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1922 


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TOM'S    T^/^(jri:?{GS 

By  F.  Poulsen 


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ETRUSCAN 


TOMB     PAINTINGS 


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Fig.   u.     'LA   BELLA   BALLERINA'    IN   THE 

TOMBA    FRANCESCA    GIUSTINIANl 
After  the  facsimile  of  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek 


Fr072ffs/'iece 


ETRUSCAN 

TOMB    PAINTINGS 


THEIR  SUBJECTS  AND  SIGNIFICANCE 


BY 


FREDERIK    POULSEN 

KEEPER  OF  THE   CLASSICAL  DEPARTMENT  OF  THE  NY   CARLSBERG  GLYPTOTEK,   COPENHAGEN 
FELLOW  OF   THE   DANISH    ROYAL   SOCIETY 


TRANSLATED  BY 


INGEBORG   ANDERSEN,    M.A. 


OXFORD 

AT    THE    CLARENDON    PRESS 


1922 


TO    MY   FRIEND    IN    STUDIES 


AND    TRAVELS 


OVE    JORGENSEN,    M.A. 


PREFACE 

THE  following  sketch  is  based  upon  investigations  made 
in  the  Etruscan  Tombs  at  Corneto  and  Chiusi,  and  on 
comparison  of  the  original  wall-paintings  with  the  fac- 
similes and  drawings  made  from  them  and  preserved  in  the 
Helbig  Museum  in  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek.  It  was 
originally  published  in  Danish,  in  1919,  as  a  guide  to 
students  in  that  Department. 

I  am  greatly  indebted  to  Mr.  G.  F.  Hill,  of  the  British 
Museum,  for  his  revision  of  the  translation. 

Meanwhile  the  first  volume  of  the  promised  work  of 
Fritz  Weege  {Etruskische  Malerei,  Halle,  1921)  has  appeared, 
copiously  and  splendidly  illustrated.  The  text  contains 
general  views  concerning  Etruscan  religion  and  society  rather 
than  descriptions  of  the  paintings  themselves,  and  I  cannot 
refrain  from  saying  that  I  find  Weege's  statements  and 
opinions,  and  the  parallels  which  he  adduces,  too  often  more 
fanciful  than  convincing,  in  spite  of  the  vast  erudition  dis- 
played therein.  I  do  not  find  anything  in  my  own  text 
which  I  feel  inclined  to  alter  after  reading  his  book. 

FREDERIK  POULSEN. 

Copenhagen, 
January  1931. 


LIST  OF   ILLUSTRATIONS 


I  Wall-painting  from  the  Tomba  Campana        .  .  Facing  page        7 

3  Main  picture  in  the  Tomba  dei  Tori  at  Corneto      ....         7 

3  Back  wall  in  the  Tomba  degli  Auguri     .  .  .  .  .  .11 

4  Right  main  wall  in  the  Tomba  degli  Auguri   .  .  .  .  .13 

5  Part  of  the  left  main  wall  in  the  Tomba  degli  Auguri.     (After  a 

coloured  drawing  in  the  Helbig  Museum) .  .  .  .  .13 

6  Painting  from  the  Tomba  del  Pulcinella  .....       13 

7  Left  main  wall  of  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni  .  .  .  -15 

8  Back  wall  of  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni  .         .         .         .         .15 

9  Picture  from  the  Tomba  del  Morto  at  Corneto        .         .         .         .16 

10  Picture  from  the  Tomba  del  Triclinio    .  .  .  .  .  .16 

1 1  '  La  bella  ballerina  '  in  the  Tomba  Francesca  Giustiniani  Frontispiece 
13  Right  main  wall  in  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni          .           Facing  page       19 

13  Back  wall  in  the  Tomba  delle  Leonesse  at  Corneto  ...       30 

14  Left  main  wall  in  the  Tomba  del  Barone        .....       20 

15  Right  main  wall  in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe     .....       23 

16  Etruscan  terra-cotta  head  in  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek  .         .       33 

17  Part  of  the  small  frieze  in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe.    (After  Arch.  Jahrb. 

1916)    ...........        23 

18  Wall-painting  from  the  Tomba  del  Morente  :  the  lassoing  of  the  horse      34 

19  Part  of  the  small  frieze  in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe.    (After  Arch.  Jahrb. 

1916)    ...........       34 

20  Part  of  the  Tomba  della  Scinunia  at  Chiusi    .         .         .         .         .24 

21  Part  of  the  small  frieze  in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe.    (After  Arch.  Jahrb. 

1916) 27 

32  Part  of  the  small  frieze  in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe.    (After  Arch.  Jahrb. 

1916) 37 

33  Symposium  in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe  ......       37 

34  Back  wall  in  the  Tomba  dei  Leopardi.     (After  Arch.  Jahrb.  1916. 

PI.  9) 31 

35  Married  couple  on  an  Etruscan  cinerary  urn  .  .  .  .  .31 


X  LIST    OF    ILLUSTRATIONS 

26  Picture  from  the  Tomba  degli  Scudi  at  Corneto      .           Facing  page  35 

27  Picture  from  the  Tomba  degh  Scudi  at  Corneto.     (After  a  coloured 

drawing  in  the  Helbig  Museum)       .  .  .  .  .         -35 

28  Arnth  Velchas  and  wife  on  couch.    Picture  in  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo. 

(After  a  coloured  drawing  in  the  Helbig  Museum)       .  .  .36 

29  Head  of  Arnth  Velchas'  wife.     From  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo      .          .  37 

30  Back  wall  in  the  Tomba  del  Vecchio      ......  37 

3 1  Symposium  in  the  Tomba  Gohni  at  Orvieto  .....  38 

32  Wall-painting  in  the  Tomba  Golini        ......  38 

33  Kitchen  interior  in  the  Tomba  Golini    ......  40 

34  Painting  in  the  Tomba  del  Letto  funebre,  at  Corneto      ...  40 

35  Demon  in  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo  .......  49 

36  Picture  in  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo  at  Corneto  .....  50 

37  Hades,  Persephone  and  Gerj^on  in  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo           .          .  50 

38  Drawing  from  Michelangelo's  sketch-book      ....  Page  51 

39  Wall-painting  from  the  Tomba  Franfois  at  Vulci    .           Facing  page  54 

40  Painting  in  the  Tomba  Golini  at  Orvieto        .....  54 

41  Painting  from  the  Tomba  della  Pulcella           .....  54 

42  ReHef  onatombaltarfromChiusi.    In  the  Barracco  Collection  in  Rome  56 

43  Cinerary  urn  from  Chiusi     .          .          .          .          .          .          .          .  56 

44  Roman  sarcophagus  in  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek          ...  58 

45  Procession  of  the  dead  in  the  Tomba  del  Tifone      ....  58 

46  Painted  frieze  in  the  Tomba  del  Cardinale      .....  58 

47  Part  of  the  frieze  in  the  Tomba  del  Cardinale          ....  58 


ETRUSCAN   TOMB-PAINTINGS 

I 

THE  tombs  and  tomb-paintings  of  Etruria  constitute  a  field 
of  archaeology  in  which  the  investigator  is  particularly 
apt  to  be  reminded  of  numerous  sins  of  omission  and 
to  be  haunted  by  a  painfully  uneasy  conscience.  Indeed,  the 
older  archaeologists  have  less  reason  to  plead  guilty  before 
the  bar  of  science  than  those  of  more  recent  times.  When 
the  discovery  and  excavation  of  the  Etruscan  tombs  began 
to  make  headway  in  the  twenties  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
publications  in  text  and  illustrations  followed  comparatively 
close  upon  the  discoveries.  The  first  misfortune,  however, 
took  place  when  three  of  the  most  interesting  tombs  were 
published,  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe,  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni, 
and  the  Tomba  del  Barone. 

It  was  the  major-domo  of  the  Bishop  of  Corneto,  Vittorio 
Masi,  who  first  opened  them  together  with  other  tombs  in 
the  vicinity  of  Corneto.  In  the  spring  of  1827  ^^  invited 
two  German  barons,  Stackelberg,  an  able  archaeologist,  and 
Kestner,  the  Hanoverian  ambassador  in  Rome,  to  inspect 
them,  and,  if  they  so  desired,  to  survey,  draw,  and  publish 
the  pictures  in  the  tombs.  The  two  men  arrived,  accom- 
panied by  Thiirmer,  a  Bavarian  architect,  to  find  the  tombs 
themselves  despoiled  of  their  accessories,  but  the  walls 
covered  with  wonderful  pictures  dating  from  the  sixth  and 
fifth  centuries  B.C.  They  set  to  work  immediately,  studying 
and  copying  the  pictures  in  the  richest  of  the  tombs,  the 
Tomba  delle  Bighe.  Stackelberg  made  five  charming  water- 
colours  in  order  to  save  the  colouring  for  posterity  ;  Thiirmer 
executed  eleven  careful  drawings.  In  all,  the  two  men  painted 
and  drew  two  hundred  and  twenty-five  figures,  and  the  whole 
of  the   material  is   now  preserved   in  the  Archaeological 

2468  B 


2  STACKELBERG  AND   KESTNER 

Seminar  of  the  University  of  Strasburg.  In  his  diary 
Stackelberg  gives  a  vivid  description  of  the  discomfort  which 
they  experienced,  drawing  by  torchlight  in  the  cold,  dank 
tomb-chamber,  and  only  emerging  now  and  then  into  the 
warm  Italian  spring  sunlight  in  order  to  recuperate  or  to 
enjoy  a  light  repast  on  the  top  of  the  tumulus,  commanding 
a  view  of  the  sea.  To  this  were  added  fatiguing  social  duties  ; 
local  patriotism  was  aroused  in  Corneto  ;  the  noble  families 
in  the  town  vied  in  displaying  hospitality  to  the  Germans, 
and  big  banquets  were  held,  at  which  sonnets  were  recited 
to  the  '  heroes  '  who  once  slept  in  the  tombs.  The  drawing 
and  copying  of  the  colours  on  the  walls  in  the  Tomb  of  the 
Chariots,  as  well  as  in  the  Tomb  of  the  Inscriptions  and  in 
the  Tomb  of  the  Baron — so  called  after  Baron  Kestner — 
were  rightly  considered  the  chief  matter,  because  in  the  very 
first  summer  after  they  were  opened,  the  dampness  of  the 
tombs  in  a  few  weeks  ruined  large  portions  of  them,  especially 
in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe.  After  his  return  to  Rome,  Baron 
Stackelberg  caught  typhoid  fever  and  did  not  recover  till  late 
in  the  winter.  In  the  next  spring  he  went  to  Germany,  where 
his  excavations  had  created  such  an  immense  sensation  that 
even  the  aged  Goethe  asked  Stackelberg  to  dine  with  him  in 
Weimar  and  studied  the  drawings  with  the  greatest  interest. 
But,  in  spite  of  the  national  enthusiasm  called  forth  by  the 
excavations,  the  projected  great  work  came  to  nothing  ;  the 
coloured  plates  of  the  paintings,  with  the  then  existing  means 
of  reproduction,  promised  to  be  so  expensive  that  the 
publishers  took  alarm.  Pending  these  negotiations,  the 
paintings  from  the  three  tombs  were  published  in  French 
and  Italian  works  in  very  poor  and  incorrect  reproductions, 
and  no  other  reproductions  were  available  till  191 6,  when  the 
German  archaeologist,  Weege,  at  last  managed  to  bring  out 
an  admirable  publication  of  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe,  the  most 
important  of  the  three  tombs  .^ 

Similar  uncoloured,  not  very  rehable  drawings  continued 
to  be  the  method  of  reproducing  the  Etruscan  tomb-paintings 

^  jfahrbuch  des  deutschen  archaologischen  Instituts,  xxxi.  1916,  p.  106  fF. 


MODERN  LITERATURE  3 

in  the  following  decades  ;  after  these  drawings  were  made 
the  reproductions  in  handbooks  like  Jules  Martha's  L'Art 
etrusque  (Paris,  1889).  An  Englishman,  George  Dennis,  in 
his  Cities  and  Cemeteries  oj  Etruria  (London,  1878),  gives  a 
vivid  description  of  Tuscan  scenery  and  of  the  ancient  tombs. 
At  times  he  rises  to  a  lyrical  enthusiasm  ;  for  instance,  in  his 
description  of  a  dancing  figure, '  la  bella  ballerina  di  Corneto ', 
in  the  Tomba  Francesca  Giustiniani.  But  neither  Dennis 
nor  any  later  visitor  procured  copies  which  come  up  to  their 
enthusiasm  ;  in  fact,  the  beautiful  ballerina  has  never  even 
been  drawn  or  photographed,  and  is  not  to  be  found  in  any 
work  on  archaeology  or  art.  Dennis's  book  throws  a  dreadful 
light  upon  contemporary  excavation.  About  Veii,  he  writes 
that  the  greater  part  of  the  district  belongs  to  the  Queen  of 
Sardinia,  who  in  the  excavating  season  positively  lets  out 
tracts  of  land  to  Roman  dealers,  who  rifle  the  tombs  of 
everything  convertible  into  cash  and  then  cover  them  in 
with  earth.  He  describes  such  an  excavation  at  Vulci  :  a 
tomb  being  opened,  nothing  but  pottery  was  found  ;  the 
excavators,  in  their  disgust,  smashed  and  destroyed  every- 
thing, in  spite  of  the  English  traveller's  protests  and  entreaties. 
This  took  place  on  the  estate  of  the  Princess  of  Canino.^ 

This  happened  in  the  sixties.  In  the  seventies  such 
vandalism  comes  to  an  end  ;  but  the  publications  do  not 
improve.  For  example,  in  the  excellent  article  on  the  Tomba 
Francois  at  Vulci  which  Korte  published  in  the  Archdo- 
logisches Jahrhuch  for  1897,  the  illustrations  are  poor:  and  it 
was  not  until  1907  that  Korte  published,  in  the  second 
volume  of  the  Antike  Denkmdler,  beautiful  coloured  repro- 
ductions of  the  paintings  in  three  tombs  at  Corneto,  the 
Tomba  dei  Tori,  the  Tomba  delle  Leonesse,  and  the  Tomba 
della  Pulcella.  A  popular  description  by  Mary  Lovett 
Cameron,  Old  Etruria  and  Modern  Tuscany  (London,  1909), 
marks  no  progress  as  far  as  the  illustrations  are  concerned, 
and  the  text  is  amateurish  and  superficial.^     Von  Stryk's 

^  Cities  and  Cemeteries,  p.  1 19.  edition  of  Luigi  Dasti's  Notizie  di  Tar- 

2  The  same  is  true  of  the  second    quinia-Corneto,  1910. 


4  MODERN  LITERATURE 

dissertation,  Die  etruskischen  Kammergrdber,  published  at 
Dorpat  in  191Q,  is  unillustrated  :  the  text  is  full  of  errors, 
and  in  the  discursive  descriptions  no  account  is  taken  of  the 
difference  between  the  present  state  of  the  tomb-paintings 
and  that  revealed  by  the  earlier  publications.  Weege's  above- 
mentioned  article  on  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe  and  the  Tomba 
dei  Leopardi  only  appeared  in  19 16  :  here  at  last  the  entire 
material  is  utilized — the  old  drawings  and  descriptions, 
modern  photographs,  and  the  author's  own  careful  notes. 
According  to  a  prospectus  recently  issued,  a  larger  work  on 
Etruscan  tomb-paintings,  by  the  same  author,  is  shortly  to 
appear  ;  it  will  be  awaited  with  interest. 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  Mr.  Weege's  book  will  supply  a 
want  which  is  felt  the  more  acutely  when  we  consider  the 
growing  interest  in  antique  painting  displayed  in  the  last 
decades.  In  1904  Furtwangler,  with  the  assistance  of  the 
painter  Reichhold,  began  the  publication  of  the  great  work 
on  the  masterpieces  of  Greek  vase-painting  {Griechische  Vasen- 
malerei),  which  was  continued  by  Hauser :  part  of  the  third 
volume  is  now  published.  In  1906  appeared  the  first  instal- 
ment of  Paul  Hermann's  great  collection  of  plates  after 
antique,  especially  Pompeian,  wall-painting ;  this  work, 
which  is  still  in  progress,  contains  beautiful  reproductions 
with  and  without  colours  {Denkmdler  der  Malerei  des  Alter- 
tums).  Finally,  in  1914,  Walther  Riezler  published  a 
splendid  work  on  the  white  Attic  lekythoi  {Weissgriindige 
attische  Lekythen).  But  during  these  years  nobody  thought 
of  bringing  to  light  the  treasures  hidden  away  in  the  sepulchral 
chambers  of  Corneto,  Chiusi,  and  Orvieto,  although  these 
pictures  were  much  more  exposed  to  destruction  than  either 
the  vases  in  the  well-guarded  rooms  of  the  Museums  or  the 
Pompeian  wall-paintings.  For  after  heavy  showers  the  floors 
of  the  deeply  sunk  tombs  of  Corneto  are  under  water,  and 
the  damp  then  loosens  the  tufa  of  the  walls  so  that  the  layer 
of  stucco,  on  which  the  colours  are  laid  al  frescOy  peels  off. 
The  heavy  iron  doors  which  the  Italian  Government  has 
placed  before  the  entrances  are  worse  than  useless,  because 


THE  NY  CARLSBERG  FACSIMILES  5 

they  shut  the  moisture  in  and  prevent  the  tombs  from  getting 
dry.  If  these  doors  had  been  placed  at  the  top  of  the  stairs 
leading  to  the  tombs,  thus  changing  place  with  the  lattice 
doors  which  are  now  there,  all  would  have  been  well. 
At  Corneto,  it  is  moisture  which  demolishes  the  stucco 
layer,  varying  from  ^  to  i  cm.  in  thickness,  and  bleaches 
the  colours — red  chalk,  vermilion,  lime-colour,  ochre,  cobalt, 
and  copper  colours,  at  Chiusi  it  is  the  drought  which  most 
frequently  destroys  the  paintings,  the  colours  here  being  laid 
directly  on  the  stone  walls. 

We  have,  therefore,  every  reason  to  be  deeply  grateful  to 
the  late  Carl  Jacobsen  who,  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineties, 
had  the  Etruscan  tomb-paintings  facsimiled  on  their  actual 
scale.  A  somewhat  similar  experiment  had  already  been 
tried,  and  the  result  is  a  number  of  facsimiles  preserved  in 
the  Museo  Gregoriano  of  the  Vatican,  but  these  are  more 
decorative  than  exact.  At  first,  the  Italian  painters,  to 
whom  Helbig,  at  the  request  of  Carl  Jacobsen,  entrusted 
the  task — the  first  was  Marozzi — evidently  imagined  that 
Carl  Jacobsen  wanted  these  paintings  as  mural  decorations 
for  his  museum  and  had  no  artistic  or  scientific  aim  in 
view,  and  letters  from  Helbig  show  that,  as  late  as  1895,  he 
did  not  scruple  to  let  Becchi,  the  painter,  fill  in  a  damaged 
head  from  a  picture  in  the  Tomba  dei  Vasi  Dipinti  after 
the  reproduction  in  Monumenti,  vol.  ix  (1870).  The  first 
copies  sent  to  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek  were  therefore 
of  the  same  '  picture-postcard  '  colouring  as  the  earlier  ones 
in  the  Museo  Gregoriano,  but  gradually  Carl  Jacobsen 
increased  the  rigour  of  his  demands  for  conscientious  exacti- 
tude, and  the  facsimiles  now  on  exhibition  in  the  Helbig 
Museum  of  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek  are  almost  all 
executed  according  to  the  more  modern  and  better  principles 
of  copying.  To  be  sure,  these  copies  still  leave  a  great  deal 
to  be  desired  in  the  way  of  scientific  exactitude  ;  I  have  been 
able  myself  to  ascertain  this  by  a  careful  comparison  with 
notes  taken  from  the  originals  in  the  tombs  of  Corneto,  and 
Weege  more  especially  has  pointed  out  rather  grave  mistakes 


6  FUTURE  REPRODUCTIONS 

in  the  copies  of  the  paintings  from  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe. 
But  these  may  be  supplemented  by  a  series  of  beautiful 
coloured  drawings  dating  from  the  last  years  of  Jacobsen's 
life  :  they  are  framed  and  constitute  a  whole  picture-book 
open  to  the  public  in  the  Helbig  Collection.  A  large  number 
01  ground  plans  and  decorative  details  are  included  in  these 
drawings,  in  addition  to  the  most  important  of  the  paintings, 
and  here  the  copying  has  been  executed  with  great  accuracy. 
The  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek,  then,  thanks  to  Carl  Jacobsen, 
is  the  place  where  investigators  can  most  easily  form  an  idea  of 
the  development  of  Etruscan  wall-painting,  far  more  easily 
than  in  Florence  where  the  late  Director,  Milani,  ordered 
new  copies  which,  in  my  opinion,  are  considerably  inferior 
to  those  of  Carl  Jacobsen.  But  for  all  that,  the  facsimiles  of 
the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek  ought  not  to  be  the  last  word  of 
science  on  the  subject.  Mr.  Weege  proposes,  as  the  method 
of  the  future,  the  taking  in  the  tombs  themselves  of  gigantic 
photographs  on  which  careful  painters  might  add  the  colour- 
ing ;  instead  of  two  there  will  thus  only  be  one  possibility  of 
distortion,  namely,  in  the  colours  themselves.  But  one  might 
perhaps  go  still  further  and  take  large  chromatic  photographs 
which  would  fix  both  forms  and  colours  for  all  time,  so  that 
we  might  view  the  gradual  destruction  of  the  originals  with 
less  dismay  than  at  present. 

A  detailed  estimate  of  the  artistic  significance  and 
properties  of  the  Etruscan  wall-paintings  is  not  yet  possible, 
if  only  because  no  adequate  pictures  for  reproduction  exist. 
What  can  be  done — and  what  will  be  attempted  in  the 
following  pages — is  to  give  an  account  of  the  content  of  the 
pictures  and  of  the  main  lines  of  their  development.  Even 
that  is  not  superfluous.  Investigators  have  never  really  given 
themselves  time  to  enter  deeply  into  the  spirit  and  content 
of  these  pictures,  or  to  ask  themselves  the  question  which 
arises,  one  may  say,  with  every  picture,  namely,  how  far  the 
representation  is  a  loan  from  Greek  art  and  civilization,  and 
how  far  it  bears  the  local  Etruscan  stamp. 


Fig.  I 
WALL-PAINTING  FROM  THE  TOMBA  CAMPANA 


Fig.  2 
MAIN  PICTURE  IN  THE  TOMBA  DEI  TORI  AT  CORNETO 


TOMBA  CAMPANA  AT  VEII 


II 

The  first  stage  of  development  is  represented  by  the 
Tomba  Campana  at  Veii.  This  tomb  was  discovered  in  1843, 
and  a  good  description  of  it  is  given  by  Canina  in  Antica 
Cittd  di  Veii  (1847),  but  it  has  never  been  published  with 
adequate  illustrations.  A  new  and  thorough  treatment  of 
the  ornamentation  and  motives  of  its  pictures  is  given  in  a 
Leipzig  dissertation  by  Andreas  Rumpf  {Die  Wandmalereien 
in  Veii,  191 5).  But  this,  too,  is  without  illustrations.  The 
central  doorway  of  the  back  wall  is  provided  with  an  orna- 
mental painted  border  and  flanked  by  paintings  in  yellow, 
grey,  and  red  on  a  blue  ground.  The  work  is  primitive. 
The  ornamentation  is  akin  to  that  of  Greek  vase-painting  of 
the  seventh  century  B.C.  The  pictures  are  purely  decorative  : 
animals  and  fabulous  animals  such  as  lion,  sphinx,  deer,  and 
panther  fill  the  surface  side  by  side  with  lotus-flowers  and 
palmettes.  There  is  no  narrative  element.  To  be  sure, 
Weege,  like  others  before  him,  has  tried  to  construe  one  of 
the  pictures  (fig.  i)  into  a  mythological  scene  :  the  boy  on 
the  horse,  which  is  led  by  the  bridle  by  a  man  walking  behind, 
is  thought  to  be  a  dead  man  on  his  way  to  Hades,  and  the 
man  with  the  loin-cloth,  carrying  an  axe  over  his  shoulder,  to 
the  left  in  front  of  the  horse,  to  be  the  Etruscan  death-god 
and  conductor  of  souls,  Charun,  to  whom  we  shall  return 
later.  Weege  also  thinks  that  the  animal  crouching  on  the 
back  of  the  horse  is  a  hunting  leopard.  But,  apart  from  the 
rather  puzzling  question,  what  the  hunting  leopard  has  to  do 
with  the  ride  to  Hades,  the  animal  is  not  a  hunting  leopard  at 
all  :  it  is  a  feline  animal  with  a  short  tail,  while  the  hunting 
leopard  has  a  long  tail.  The  animal  was  only  placed  there  to 
fill  up  the  space,  thus  illustrating  the  poverty  of  ideas  in 
these  pictures.  Moreover,  as  the  man  with  the  axe  is  not 
characterized  as  Charun,  either  by  colour  or  by  dress,  it 
seems  unnecessary  to  force  a  mjrthological  explanation.  The 
human  figures  in  this  picture,  as  in  the  Melian  vases  of  the 


8  TOMBA  CAMPANA  AT  VEII 

seventh  centurj'  B.C.,  are  purely  decorative  :  they  ride  when 
the  space  above  the  back  of  the  horse  has  to  be  filled  in,  and 
they  walk  when  a  long,  narrow  field  makes  the  human  figure 
more  appropriate  than  a  seated  or  walking  animal  as  a  means 
of  filling  the  space.  The  absurd  alternation  of  colours  within 
the  same  figure,  every  single  animal  being  coloured  in  com- 
partments of  yellow  and  red  and  having  alternately  red  and 
yellow  legs,  affords  a  good  instance  of  purely  decorative 
conception  and  suggests  the  idea  of  woven  tapestry.  Hence 
it  is  an  all  but  obvious  conclusion  to  imagine,  as  prototype 
of  this  painting,  some  magnificently  coloured  wall-tapestry 
imported  into  Etruria  in  the  seventh  century  B.C.  from  Crete 
or  one  of  the  islands  in  the  Aegean  Sea,  to  the  vase-paintings 
of  which  the  ornamentation  of  the  tomb  shows  close  affinity.^ 
Thus  there  is  in  these  pictures  neither  any  action  nor  any 
reference  to  death  or  the  tomb.  They  serve  as  a  decorative 
ornamentation  of  the  tomb-chamber,  like  the  six  painted 
shields  in  the  inner  chamber  of  the  tomb,  which  suggest 
those  '  brass  circles  '  mentioned  by  Livy  (viii,  20,  8)  as 
common  votive  offerings  in  early  Rome.  We  can  imagine 
the  home  of  a  rich  Etruscan  in  the  seventh  century  decorated 
with  similar  frescoes  :  painted  tapestries  and  painted  shields 
as  substitutes  for  real  wall-tapestries  and  metal  shields.^  The 
Tomba  Campana  is  the  most  impressive  but  not  the  only 
representative  of  this  earliest  class  of  tombs,  in  the  ornamen- 
tation of  which  only  decorative  considerations  have  been 
kept  in  view.  Tombs  at  Cosa,  Chiusi,  Magliano,  and  Caere 
contain  still  more  primitive  paintings  of  the  same  sort,  but 
they  are  badly  preserved  and  still  more  imperfectly  described.^ 

^  Cp.  Fr.  Poulsen,  Der  Orient  und  tury  B.C.   The  horsemen,  in  particular, 

die  friihgriechische  KuTist,  p.  128,  where  recall  the  frieze  from  Prinia  in  Crete, 

I  tried  to  prove  that  the  pictures  of  the  Bollettino  d'Arte,  1908,  p.  457  S. 

tomb  are  influenced  by  the  art  and  ^  Shields  were  also  common  mural 

stj'le  of  decoration  of  the  island  of  decorations   with   the   early   Greeks, 

Cyprus.     Rumpf   {op.   cit.    50)    was  cp.  Poulsen,  Orient,  p.  77,  and  Al- 

nearer  the  mark  in  perceiving  the  con-  caeus,  fragm  15  (Bergk). 

nexion  with  the  decorative  art  of  Crete  ^  See    the    summary    account    in 

and  the  Cyclades  in  the  seventh  cen-  Rumpf,  op.  cit.  61  ff. 


TOMBA  DEI  TORI  AT  CORNETO      9 

III 

The  next  stage  in  the  development  is  represented  by  the 
Tomba  dei  Tori  at  Cometo,  discovered  in  1892  and  admirably 
published  by  G.  Korte  in  Antike  Denkmdler}     The  back 
wall  of  the  main  chamber  in  this  tomb  has  two  doors,  and  it 
is  between  these  that  the  one  large  figure  painting  is  placed, 
again  in  such  a  way  as  to  suggest  a  tapestry  stretched  on  the 
wall  (fig,  2).    But  now  the  picture  has  a  narrative  content, 
inasmuch  as  a  scene  from  the  Greek  cycle  of  myths  is  depicted: 
Achilles  watches  for  the  Trojan  prince  Troilus  at  a  well. 
Achilles,  to  the  left,  wears  a  crested   Corinthian  helmet, 
sword,  greaves,  and  red  loin-cloth.     Troilus  is  naked  and 
only  decorated  with  armlets  and  elegant  shoes.     He  wears 
his  hair  long,  according  to  Ionic  fashion,  and  in  his  hand  he 
carries  a  goad  (kentron).    This  is,  as  a  rule,  only  used  when 
two  horses  are  ridden,  and  the  drawing  shows  traces  of 
double  contours  near  the  head  and  the  right  leg  of  the  horse  ; 
it  is  probable,  therefore,  that  two  horses  were  originally 
planned.     In  this  picture  also,  the  proportions  of  man  and 
horse  are  impossible,  but  progress  is  perceptible  in  the  mono- 
chromatic treatment  of  the  body  and  legs  of  the  horse.    On 
the  other  hand,  the  old  manner  of  painting  in  stripes  or 
compartments  is  still  retained  in  the  running  chimera  in  the 
pediment  above  ;   it  also  lingers  for  a  very  long  time  in  the 
pedimental  figures  of  the  following  period.     The  style  is 
Ionic  of  the  first  half  of  the  sixth  century  B.C.     A  truly 
Ionian  monster,  created  under  Oriental  influence,  is  the 
human-faced  bull  in  the  pediment  above  the  door,  one  of 
the  two  bulls  from  which  the  tomb  derives  its  name,  and 
which  are  omitted  here  because  of  the  obscene  groups  on 
either  side  of  them.    Other  decorative  details  point  to  Cyrene 
and  Egypt,  especially  the  characteristic  frieze  of  lotuses  and 
pomegranates,  which  corresponds  with  the  Gyrenaic  vases  of 
the  sixth  century  B.C.,  and  the  stylized  flower-bed  under  the 

1  II,  Tafel  41,  and  Hilfstafel  i-8. 
2468  c 


10  TOMBADEITORl 

belly  of  the  horse,  which  has  its  origin  in  Egyptian  and  its 
parallels  in  Phoenician  and  in  orientalizing  Greek  art.^  In 
this  tomb  the  painting  is  not  executed  al  Jresco  but  in  a 
yellowish-white  pigment  which  unfortunately  scales  off  in 
large  flakes. 

Thus  in  the  Tomba  dei  Tori,  besides  a  decorative  treat- 
ment of  the  wall  surface  with  friezes,  we  have  a  main  picture 
with  a  mythological  subject,  painted  in  the  Greek  spirit  and 
perhaps  actually  executed  by  a  Greek  mural  painter.  We  do 
not  find  even  the  slightest  allusion  to  death  or  entombment, 
or  the  least  trace  of  any  Etruscan  characteristics.  The 
inscription  in  the  large  frieze  is  of  interest  because  it  shows 
the  Etruscan  language  in  its  archaic  form,  with  a  rich  vocali- 
zation which  must  have  made  it  much  more  euphonious  than 
the  language  spoken  later,  in  the  fourth  or  following  centuries. 
The  inscription  runs :  '  arnth  spuriana  s[uth]il  hece  ce 
fariceka,'  and  means,  '  Aruns  Spurinna  monumentum  sepul- 
crale  .  .  .  condidit,  adornavit,'  or  the  like.^ 


IV 

A  CONSIDERABLE  group  of  Etruscan  tomb-paintings,  dating 
from  the  middle  of  the  sixth  century,  show  in  their  composi- 
tion close  connexion  with  Ionic  vase-painting,  especially  with 
the  so-called  Caeretan  hydriae,  while  their  main  pictures  tell 
us  something  about  the  Etruscans  themselves  and  their 
conceptions  of  Life  and  Death  and  Eternity.  Only  in  the 
animal  friezes  beneath  the  painted  roof-supports  does  the 
old  decorative  conception  of  the  human  and  animal  figure 
still  linger  ;  elsewhere  the  pictures  now  have  content  and 
meaning. 

We   may   take   the   Tomba   degli   Auguri   in   Corneto, 

^  Poulsen,  Orient,  p.  67.  other  inscriptions,  and  for  numerous 

2  I  am  greatly  indebted  to  Professor  linguistic  suggestions  on  the  general 

O.  A.  Danielsson  of  Upsala  for  in-  subject  of  my  treatise. 

formation  about  this  as  well  as  about 


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TOMBA  DEGLIA  U  G  U  R  I  ii 

discovered  in  1878,  as  our  starting-point.  There  are  coloured 
drawings  as  well  as  full-sized  facsimiles  of  its  pictures  in  the 
Helbig  Museum. 

The  middle  of  the  back  wall  of  this  tomb  is  occupied  by 
a  painted  door  flanked  by  two  men  in  white  chitons  and 
short  black  cloaks  lined  with  red  ;  on  their  feet  are  peaked 
shoes.  They  raise  both  arms  in  a  gesture  of  lament, '  beating 
their  foreheads  '  as  the  ancient  texts  have  it.^  With  this 
scene  (fig.  3)  the  key-note  is  struck  :  the  living  stand  at  the 
door  of  the  tomb  and  moan  for  the  dead,  a  subject  specially 
appropriate  to  the  decoration  of  the  walls  of  a  tomb. 

The  scenes  on  the  main  walls  are  also  associated  with  the 
funeral  ceremonies.  On  the  right-hand  main  wall  (fig.  4)  a 
boy  is  seen  to  the  left  in  a  white  tunic  with  black  dots,  carrying 
a  stool  and  raising  one  arm  and  his  face  to  a  man  who,  dressed 
in  a  red  and  brown  cloak  and  brown  shoes,  seems  to  beckon 
to  the  boy  with  his  right  hand,  gesticulating  at  the  same  time 
with  his  left.  Between  them  a  small  figure  is  seated  who 
reminds  one  of  the  small  boys  in  the  Greek  tomb  reliefs 
'  weeping  on  their  cold  knees  '.  To  the  right  is  another  man 
clad  in  chiton  and  mantle,  gesticulating  violently  with  his 
left  hand,  and  carrying  a  crook  in  his  right.  Above  him,  and 
above  the  excited  man  to  the  right,  runs  the  inscription  : 
*  Tevarath ',  probably  meaning  umpire  {^pa^evryj^,  dycDvo- 
BiTrjs).  For  now  follow  representations  of  athletic  contests  : 
two  wrestlers  engaging  in  the  initial  grips,  the  elder  bearded, 
the  younger  beardless :  between  them  are  seen  the  prizes — 
metal  bowls  ;  these  are  supposed  to  be  arranged  in  the 
background,  but  owing  to  the  lack  of  perspective  they  seem 
to  be  in  the  way  of  the  combatants.  This  scene  throws  light 
on  the  preceding  one  :  the  man  with  the  crook  is  evidently 
not  an  augur,  as  originally  conjectured  because  of  the  staff 
and  the  flying  birds,  but  the  umpire  who  has  to  see  that  no 
unfair  tricks  are  used  ;   the  other  man  is  the  spectator  who 

^  ITaieti'  TO  fieVcoira,  Dionys.  Hali-    see  Sittl,  Gebdrden  der  Griechen  und 
earn,  x.  9  ;  '  frontem  ferire  ',  Cicero,    Rdmer,  p.  21. 
Epist.  ad  Attic,  i.  1 ;  for  other  instances 


12  TOMBADEGLIAUGURI 

has  not  yet  seated  himself,  but  beckons  to  the  slave-boy  to 
bring  him  the  stool  on  which  he  will  sit  down  like  the  Roman 
knights  of  later  times  who  brought  their  own  stools  into  the 
orchestra  of  the  theatre.  On  the  other  hand,  the  mourning, 
crouching  slave-boy  seems  to  repeat  the  death  lament  of  the 
back  wall.  Here  already,  then,  we  can  observe  the  curious 
fragmentariness  of  the  scenes  in  Etruscan  art :  they  look  as 
if  they  had  been  cut  out  of  more  comprehensive  wholes,  and 
put  together  without  logical  sequence.  Clarity  and  unity  are 
wanting.  There  is  not  the  sustained  composition  or  the 
pleasure  in  detailed  narrative  which  are  regular  in  Greek 
and  Egyptian  art.  The  Etruscan  artist  is  content  with  hints 
and  fragments. 

To  the  right  of  the  wrestlers,  on  the  same  main  wall, 
is  a  particularly  interesting  representation  :  beneath  the 
inscription  Phersu,  a  man,  dressed  and  masked  like  a  punchi- 
nello,  is  leading  a  dog  in  a  long  leash  which  is  wound  round 
his  antagonist  and  ends  in  a  wooden  collar  round  the  neck 
of  the  dog.  The  ferocious  blood-hound  has  inflicted  bleeding 
wounds  on  the  legs  and  thighs  of  the  antagonist,  and  the 
antagonist,  whose  head  is  muffled  in  a  sack,  is  vainly  trying 
to  disentangle  himself  from  the  leash  and  to  hit  the  dog  with 
a  club.  The  explanation  of  this  exciting  and  brutal  contest, 
to  which  no  parallel  can  be  found  in  Greek  art,  is  evidently 
that  Phersu  tries  to  make  his  dog  bite  his  antagonist  to  death 
before  the  latter  can  get  his  head  out  of  the  sack  and  hit  man 
and  dog  with  his  club.  If  the  club-bearer  succeeds  in  freeing 
himself  from  the  sack  and  the  dog,  Phersu  has  only  one 
chance  :  to  run  away.  As  runner,  he  has  his  legs  stiffened 
with  thongs,  and  in  the  much  damaged  fresco  on  the  left 
main  wall  of  the  tomb  we  see  the  flight  of  Phersu  (fig.  5)  and 
(not  reproduced)  the  club-bearer  pursuing  him.  They  are 
separated  by  a  pair  of  pugilists  who  are  boxing  to  the  accom- 
paniment of  flutes,  again  an  evidence  of  Etruscan  indifference 
to  incongruities  in  the  composition.  The  escaping  Phersu 
is  painted  alone  in  another  tomb  at  Corneto,  the  Tomba  del 
Pulcinella,  the  name  of  which  is  derived  from  this  figure,  but 


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TOMBADELPULCINELLA  13 

here  he  is  placed  beside  a  horseman  (fig.  6),  who  represents 
the  equestrian  processions  at  funerals,  to  which  we  shall  turn 
our  attention  later.  The  Tomba  del  Pulcinella,  which  was 
discovered  in  1872,  also  dates  from  the  sixth  century  B.C., 
and  like  the  Tomb  of  the  Augur  it  bears  the  stamp  of  Ionic 
art,  especially  in  the  receding  contours  of  the  crown  of  the 
head  and  in  the  plump  forms  of  the  body. 

In  these  two  sepulchres,  then,  we  are  confronted  with 
representations  which  are  associated  not  only  with  death 
and  the  tomb,  but  also  with  Etruscan  local  customs  and 
national  character.  It  is  true  that  prize-fights  and  wrestling 
contests  in  connexion  with  obsequies  are  known  in  the 
Greek  civilized  world  as  well,  for  instance  from  the  descrip- 
tion in  the  Iliad  of  the  funeral  of  Patroclus,  and  lingered  for 
a  long  time  especially  in  the  outskirts  of  the  Greek  world — 
thus  King  Nicocles  of  Cyprus,  in  the  beginning  of  the  fourth 
century  B.C.,  honoured  his  deceased  father  with  choral 
dancing,  athletic  games,  horse-races,  trireme  races .^  But  we 
know  of  no  example  from  Hellas  of  a  fight  like  that  between 
Phersu,  accompanied  by  his  blood-hound,  and  the  muffled 
club-bearer :  a  fight  the  attraction  of  which,  apart  from  its 
sanguinary  character,  evidently  depended  on  the  disparity 
of  the  weapons,  as  it  did  in  the  combat  between  gladiator 
and  retiarius,  the  man  armed  with  net  and  trident,  in  the 
Roman  arenas  of  a  later  day.^ 

From  the  Greek  author  Athenaeus,^  we  learn  that  the 
gladiatorial  games  originated  in  Campania,  where  they  were 
introduced  as  entertainments  at  banquets,  but  that  the 
Romans  adopted  them  from  the  Etruscans.  This  tradition 
is  confirmed  by  the  facts  that  the  name  applied  to  the  leader 
and  trainer  of  the  Roman  gladiatorial  school,  lanista,  is  of 
Etruscan  origin,  and  that  the  person,  who  even  in  late  Rome  * 
dragged  the  corpses  from  the  arena,  the  so-called  Dispater, 

^  Isocrates  ix,  I .  Cortsen,VocabulorumEtruscoruminter- 

2  With  reference  to  phersu,  which  is  pretatio  in  Nord.  Tidsskr.  for  Filologi, 

supposed  to  be  synonymous  with  and  1917,  p.  174. 

the  origin  of  the  Latin  persona,  see  *  iv.  153  f. 

Pauly-Wissowa,   vi.   775,   and  S.   P.  *  TertulHan,  Ad  nation,  i.  10. 


14  GLADIATORS   IN  ETRURIA 

was  furnished  with  satyr-ears  and  a  mask  with  savage  features, 
and  carried  a  hammer,  thus  being  a  faithful  copy  of  the 
Etruscan  death-god,  Charun.^  Moreover,  as  the  Etruscans 
in  the  heyday  of  their  glory,  in  the  sixth  and  fifth  cen- 
turies B.C.,  also  ruled  over  Campania,  it  is  most  natural  to 
attribute  to  them,  and  not  to  the  Campanian  Graeculi,  the 
doubtful  honour  of  being  the  actual  '  inventors  '  of  gladia- 
torial combats.  These  combats  were  a  piquant  and  exciting 
substitute  for  actual  human  sacrifices  in  honour  of  the 
deceased  noble  or  the  gods,  and  as  one  of  the  parties  was 
given  a  chance  to  save  his  life  the  practice  may  even  be 
considered  an  advance  in  humanity. 

Etruscan  obscurity  and  inconsistency  lead  to  curious 
confusion  in  the  transition  from  mythological  pictures  to 
funereal  scenes.  Thus  we  find  on  the  front  of  an  early 
archaic  Etruscan  terra-cotta  sarcophagus,  now  in  the  British 
Museum,^  a  representation  in  relief,  manifestly  inspired  by 
Greek  mythology,  of  a  battle  scene  with  men  and  women  as 
spectators  ;  at  one  end  of  the  sarcophagus,  the  left,  leave- 
taking  before  marching  out  to  battle  ;  on  the  back,  a  ban- 
queting-scene,  evidently  representing  the  funeral  feast,  since 
the  relief  on  the  other  end  of  the  sarcophagus  shows  four 
mourning  women,  two  of  them  holding  drinking-bowls  in 
their  hands. 


A  GOOD  idea  of  the  different  sort  of  athletic  contests  at 
the  great  Etruscan  funerals  is  given  by  the  wall-paintings  in 
the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni  at  Corneto,  described  and  copied 
by  Stackelberg  and  Kestner  in  1827,^  and  represented  in  the 
Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek  by  facsimiles  and  coloured  drawings 
executed  in  1907,  after  a  chemical  treatment  of  the  plaster 
stucco,  which  brought  out  a  number  of  details  more  plainly. 

^  Pauly-Wissowa,  iii.  2178.  Sarcophagiin British Mttseum,  pLix-xi. 

^B   630.     Figured  in   Terra-cotta        ^  Kestner,  ^wna/ji  (1829),  p.  loi  fF. 


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TOMBADELLEISCRIZIONI         15 

The  pictures  are  of  the  same  period  as  those  of  the  Augur  tomb, 
and  of  similar  style.  The  numerous  inscriptions  from  which 
the  tomb  has  derived  its  title  seem  to  be  mostly  proper 
names.  Each  of  the  three  wall-surfaces  of  this  tomb,  which 
contains  only  one  chamber,  has  a  false  painted  door  in  the 
middle.  Of  the  first  figures  on  the  left  main  wall,  two 
pugilists,  only  very  little  is  preserved  (fig.  7).  They  are 
contending,  like  the  two  wrestlers  to  the  right  of  them,  one 
of  whom  has  lifted  the  other  from  the  ground,  to  the  accom- 
paniment of  the  flute-player  who  is  standing  between  the 
two  groups.  This  and  many  other  Etruscan  paintings  confirm 
the  statement  of  Aristotle  ^  that  the  Etruscans  made  their 
boxers  perform  to  the  sound  of  the  flute.  Flute-playing  was 
so  popular  that  masters  scourged  their  slaves  and  caused 
their  cooks  to  work  in  the  kitchen  to  the  sound  of  the  flute  ; 
and  here  again  the  Romans  adopted  the  Etruscan  tradition 
and  gave  their  flute-players  a  recognized  position  in  the 
community,  as  is  shown  by  the  amusing  story  about  the  strike 
of  the  Roman  flute-players  ^ :  the  flute-players  left  Rome  in 
disgust  and  went  in  a  body  to  Tibur,  and  the  only  device  the 
Romans  could  think  of  was  to  make  the  excellent  fellows 
drunk  and  cart  them  back  to  Rome,  where  the  citizens  made 
haste  to  confirm  the  ancient  privileges  of  the  flute-players 
and  to  add  several  new  ones  in  order  to  make  the  awakening 
more  pleasant. 

On  the  other  side  of  the  false  door  the  equestrian  proces- 
sion begins  and  is  continued  on  the  back  wall  to  the  central 
false  door  (fig.  8).  Four  young  naked  horsemen,  some  of 
them  with  staves  in  their  hands,  are  received  by  a  naked 
youth  who  carries  a  palm-branch  over  his  shoulder.  Apart 
from  the  nakedness,  which  must  be  attributed  to  the  influence 
of  Greek  art,  this  equestrian  procession  is  genuinely  Etruscan. 
Appian  derives  the  festive  processions  at  triumphs  and 
funerals  from  Etruscan  prototypes,  while  Dionysius  of  Hali- 
carnassus  finds  their  prototypes  in  Hellas.  But  it  cannot  be 
denied  that  Dionysius's  description  of  these  pompae  in  early 
^  Athenaeus  iv.  154a.  ^  Ljyy  jx.  30.  5-10.   Plutarch,  ^efta/Jowtana,  55. 


i6  TOMBADELMORTO 

Rome  ^  suggests  Etruria  :  first  came  young  horsemen,  then 
foot-soldiers  ;  after  these,  athletes  with  their  sexual  organs 
covered  (in  contrast  to  Greek  custom),  then  the  tripartite 
chorus  of  dancers  in  purple  cloaks  and  bronze  belts,  then  the 
grotesque  dancers,  flute-players,  lyre-players,  and  thurifers, 
and  finally  the  procession  of  chariots  with  the  images  of  the 
gods.  In  the  following  pages  we  shall  make  acquaintance 
with  all  these  groups  in  the  Etruscan  world  of  art. 

The  equestrian  procession  is  presumably  the  preliminary 
to  a  horse-race.  The  nobles  of  Etruria  were  celebrated  for 
their  race-horses  and  often  sent  their  chariot-teams  to  the 
games  in  early  Rome.^  It  is  a  characteristic  fact  that  one  of 
the  few  Etruscan  words  given  by  the  Greek  lexicographer 
Hesychius  is  no  other  than  the  word  for  horse,  Sa/^vos 
according  to  the  Greek  version.^ 

To  the  right  of  the  false  door  in  the  back  wall  three  jolly 
dancers  are  seen  :  the  first  has  his  brow  wreathed,  carries 
a  drinking-bowl  in  hand,  and  wears  boots,  red  skirt,  and 
blue  neckerchief.  The  figure  is  shown  by  the  flesh  tint  to  be 
male,  not  female  as  stated  in  Carl  Jacobsen's  catalogue. 
After  him  dances  the  flute-player,  with  red  boots,  blue  loin- 
cloth, and  red  chaplet,  and  last  comes  a  naked  dancing  youth 
with  boots,  necklace,  and  chaplet. 

Dancers  appear  in  a  number  of  Etruscan  tomb-paintings, 
and  abandon  themselves  to  their  gambols  with  a  frenzy  which 
might  seem  incompatible  with  death  and  entombment.  In 
the  Tomba  del  Morto  at  Corneto,  dating  from  the  same 
period,  we  find  traces  of  a  pirouetting  dancer  close  to  the 
couch  of  the  dead  and  the  lamenting  mourners  ;  the  dance 
was  thus  as  important  as  the  funeral  lament  (fig.  9).  The 
finest  representations  of  Etruscan  mourning  dancers  are 
found  m  the  Tomba  del  Triclinio,  which  dates  from  the 
beginning  of  the  fifth  century  B.C.  :  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyp- 

^  Dionys.  Halicarn.  vii.  72-3.  Nordisk    Tidsskr.  for  Filologi,  1917  ; 

^  Livy  i.  35.  9.  no     doubt     because     he     considers 

^  Hesych.  5.  v.     The  word  is  not  Hesychius's    statement    insufficiently 

mentioned  in  S.  P.  Cortsen's   Voca-  authoritative.     Cp.    Skutsch,   Pauly- 

bulorum    Etruscorum    interpretatio    in  Wissowa,  vi.  775. 


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TOMBADELTRICLINIO  17 

totek  contains  several  earlier,  inferior  facsimiles,  made  from 
the  copies  in  the  Museo  Gregoriano  and  only  touched  up  at 
Corneto  by  the  painter  Mariani ;  ^  and  some  more  recent  ones 
carefully  executed  on  the  spot  (fig.  10).  On  each  wall  three 
female  and  two  male  dancers  are  seen  among  trees  ;  fillets  and 
singing-birds  appear  in  the  foliage.  The  male  dancers  play 
on  lyre  and  flute  ;  the  dancing-girls  have  castanets  and  the 
foremost  a  strap  or  chaplet  with  bells  over  her  shoulder. 
Similar  chaplets  with  bells  are  often  seen  hanging  on  the 
walls  in  pictures  representing  the  symposia  in  honour  of  the 
dead  (see  below),  and  bear  witness  to  the  childish  predilec- 
tion of  the  Etruscans  for  gipsy-like  noise  and  merry-making. 
The  most  beautiful  dancing-girl,  however,  in  any  Etruscan 
tomb  is  the  already  mentioned  '  bella  ballerina  di  Corneto  ', 
discovered  on  a  wall  in  the  Tomba  Francesca  Giustiniani. 
We  give  this  figure,  which  has  never  been  reproduced,  after 
the  facsimile  in  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek  which  arrived 
there  shortly  before  the  death  of  Carl  Jacobsen  and  gave  him 
one  of  the  last  pleasures  in  his  life  (fig.  11), 

When  I  examined  the  original  in  the  tomb  at  Corneto 
I  made  the  following  notes  :  the  drapery  (chiton),  which  is 
ornamented  with  a  pattern  of  dotted  rosettes,  is  distinctly 
preserved  from  the  hips  down  to  the  elegant  fluttering  edge. 
Much  of  the  middle  part  of  the  body  has  been  destroyed  ; 
the  fluttering  ends  of  the  red  scarf  across  the  shoulders  are 
visible  to  right  and  left.  The  upper  part  of  the  body  and  the 
shoulders  are  also  well  preserved.  The  right  arm  is  raised, 
and  visible  from  shoulder  to  elbow  ;  a  faint  outline  of  the 
left  arm  is  also  visible.^  Of  the  head,  the  brow,  the  beginning 
of  the  nose,  the  ear,  the  green  fluttering  head-dress,  the  red 
hair  with  a  loosened  tress  in  front  of  the  ear  have  been  pre- 
served. To  the  spectator  the  picture  still  conveys  an  impres- 
sion of  joy,  of  graceful  movement,  and  of  filmy  fluttering 
draperies. 

^  Helbig's  letters  of  June  21   and    gives  more  than  I  at  any  rate  could 
December  lo,  1895.  see:  on  the  other  hand,  less  as  far  as 

^  Thus  the  facsimile  at  this  point    brow  and  nose  are  concerned. 

246S  D 


i8  ETRUSCAN  DANCE  AND  SONG 

Here  also  we  find  Etruscan  tradition  continued  on  Roman 
soil,  not  only  in  the  dancers  of  the  festival  processions,  but 
in  the  tradition  that  Etruscan  dancers,  ludii  or  ludiones,  were 
imported  to  Rome  to  dance  at  the  great  festivals.  The  Greeks 
compared  the  Roman  reel  to  the  Dionysiac  '  cancan ',  a-CKLvvi<;, 
while  its  Roman  name  is  tripudium  ;  it  was  danced  at  every 
period  of  Roman  history  by  the  Salii,  the  ancient  priesthood 
of  the  Roman  war-god,  on  the  chief  festival  of  the  god, 
March  19.  According  to  Livy  (vii.  2.  4-7)  the  earliest 
Roman  poetry,  the  coarse  Fescennines,  originated  in  the  text 
which  accompanied  the  dance  of  the  ludiones,  and  the  fact 
that  the  dancers  during  the  Fescennines  daubed  their  faces 
with  minium  supports  the  theory  of  Etruscan  influence,  which 
also  makes  itself  felt  in  the  custom  observed  by  the  Roman 
triumphators,  who  in  the  earliest  times  daubed  their  whole 
bodies  with  minium.  For  we  know  that  the  Etruscans  coated 
the  images  of  their  gods  with  minium  at  their  festivals,  and 
that  the  Romans  gave  the  ancient  terracotta  statue  of  the 
Capitoline  Jupiter  a  similar  coat  of  '  war  paint '  at  the  high 
festivals,  a  task  which  it  fell  to  the  censors  to  superintend.^ 
The  red  minium  was  meant  to  heighten  the  natural  red-brown 
hue  of  the  men ;  it  produced  an  artificial  virile  complexion, 
just  as  white  lead  and  chalk  served  to  emphasize  the  pale 
feminine  hue.^ 

The  primitive  nature  of  the  verses  connected  with  these 
dances  is  shown  by  the  song  of  the  Salii,  the  burden  of 
which  is  the  five  times  repeated  '  triumpe  '  (jump  !)  and  the 
text  of  which  runs  :  '  Help  us,  lares,  let  not  the  evil  disease 
fall  upon  any  more  of  us.  Mars  !  Be  satisfied,  cruel  Mars  ! 
Jump  on  to  the  threshold.  Cease  jumping.  Help  us, 
Mars  !  *  At  the  triumphs  also,  '  carmina  incondita  ',  as  Livy 
tells  us,  were  sung  (iv.  20.  2),  and  we  venture  to  think  that 
Etruscan  poetry  was  no  better  than  this,  and  that  the  dis- 
appearance of  the  texts,  which  accompanied  the  dances,  is 

^  Plutarch,  Aetia  Romana  98.  women    used   white    lead   as   paint : 

*  Plautus,    Truculentus    290,    294,     Lysias  i.  14  and  17. 
Mostellaria  259  fF.     In  Greece  also, 


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TOMBADELLEISCRIZIONI         19 

no  great  loss.  Varro  mentions  tragedies  in  the  Etruscan 
language,  but  they  were  undoubtedly  versions  of  the  Greek 
ones,  eyen  worse  than  those  made  for  the  Romans  by  Livius 
Andronicus.  Apart  from  some  religious  and  a  little  his- 
torical literature,  and  a  number  of  recipes  for  the  gather- 
ing of  simples,  capable  of  rousing  the  admiration  of  the 
Greeks  for  '  the  descendants  of  the  Tyrrhenians,  the  people 
skilled  in  medical  lore  ',^  no  tradition  of  any  Etruscan  intel- 
lectual life  in  writing  or  poetry  has  been  handed  down  to 
posterity. 

We  pass  on  to  the  right  main  wall  in  the  Tomba  delle 
Iscrizioni  (fig.  12)  where  dancers  in  a  row  with  drinking- 
bowls  in  their  hands  alternate  with  servants  carrying  wine  in 
large  bowls.  That  the  funeral  dance  was  animated  by  free 
indulgence  in  wine  is  often  exemplified  in  the  tombs.  In  the 
Tomba  delle  Leonesse,  named  after  the  beasts  of  prey  in  the 
pediment,  which  are  really  hunting  leopards,  a  red-brown  lad 
to  the  right  is  dancing  with  a  girl  ;  to  the  left  is  a  woman 
with  castanets,  and  in  the  centre,  flanked  by  a  flute-player 
and  a  lyre-player,  stands  the  wine-bowl  wreathed  with  fresh 
leaves  (fig.  13),  '  the  wine-bowl  filled  with  joy,'  in  Xeno- 
phanes'  words.  Evidently  the  Etruscans  drank  heavily  to 
celebrate  the  memory  of  their  dead,  as  Xenophon  relates  of 
another  barbarian  tribe,  the  Odrysians.^  To  the  right  of  the 
false  door  of  the  same  main  wall  in  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni 
(fig.  12),  a  man  in  a  loin-cloth  with  a  laurel  branch  in  each 
hand  is  greeting  another  man,  who  carries  chaplets  and  rests 
one  leg  on  the  cushions  of  a  couch.  Laurel  branches  con- 
stantly recur  in  the  reliefs  of  the  Etruscan  cinerary  urns, 
where  the  death  lament  round  the  bier  of  the  deceased  is 
reproduced,  and  it  seems  probable  that  laurel  branches  were 
carried  round  the  house  and  used  for  wall  decoration  in  the 
house  of  the  deceased  on  the  funeral  day,  for  the  purpose  of 
purification.  This  decoration  of  the  walls,  then,  would  be 
the  subject  of  our  picture,  together  with  the  other  preparations 

^  Quotation    from    Aeschylus    by    opinion):   History  of  Plants  ix..  15.  i. 
Theophrastus     (who     endorses     the        ^  Hellenka  iii.  3.  5. 


20  LAUREL  DECORATIONS 

for  the  funeral,  as  shown  by  the  paintings.^  Perhaps  it  was  a 
general  custom  of  the  Etruscans  to  decorate  their  walls  on 
festival  days  with  laurel  branches,  just  as  the  Egyptians 
decorated  theirs  with  lotus,  and  this  would  often  account 
for  all  the  foliage  which  appears  in  the  backgrounds  of  the 
paintings  alternating  with  suspended  chaplets,  even  where 
the  action — the  death  lament  (fig.  9)  or  the  symposium- 
takes  place  indoors.  In  other  cases,  however,  as  in  the  Tomba 
dei  Tori  (fig.  2)  and  in  the  Tomba  del  Triclinio  (fig.  10),  there 
is  no  doubt  that  real  trees  and  open-air  scenes  are  represented, 
but  even  there  the  chaplets  are  often  seen  hanging — on  the 
wall.  Again  a  proof  of  the  want  of  clarity  in  Etruscan  art  ! 
Trees,  however,  in  the  background  of  scenes  with  figures  are 
also  found  on  South  Italian  vases  of  the  same  time,  and  thus 
seem  to  be  a  common  Italic  trait. 


VI 

Contemporary  with  the  group  of  the  Tomba  degli  Auguri 
and  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni  is  the  Tomba  del  Barone, 
discovered  at  Corneto  in  1827  ^^^  named,  as  already  men- 
tioned, after  Baron  Kestner.  After  the  paintings  of  this  tomb 
Stackelberg  executed  a  fine  water-colour,  and  Thiirmer  a 
number  of  drawings,  now  in  the  University  of  Strasburg. 
The  style — both  in  the  shape  of  the  heads  and  in  the  treatment 
of  the  draperies — is  still  Ionic,  but  the  proportions  are  more 
slender,  probably  owing  to  Chian  or  Attic  influence. 

Composition  and  technique  are  both  unique  in  the 
paintings  of  this  tomb.  We  content  ourselves  with  repro- 
ducing one  main  wall,  the  left  (fig.  14),  where  a  black  horse 
with  light  grey  hoofs,  mane,  and  tail,  is  led  by  a  man  wearing 
red  boots  and  a  brown  mantle  lined  with  green.     He  is 

^  Cp.  Tacitus,  //iy/or.  iv.  53,  on  the  dicabatur  evinctum  vittis  coronisque ; 
inauguration  of  the  rebuilt  Capito-  ingressi  milites,  quis  fausta  nomina, 
lium  :  '  spatium  omne  quod  templo    fdicibus  ramis.' 


Fig.   13.     BACK    WALL    IN    THE   TOMBA   DELLE   LEONESSE 
After  a  drawing  in  the  Helbig  JNIuseum 


Fig.   14-     LEFT    MAIN    WALL    IN   THE   TOMBA   DEL   BARONE 


TOMBA  DEL  BARONE  21 

speaking  with  one  hand  raised  to  a  woman  in  a  long  grey 
chiton,  a  brown  mantle  lined  with  green,  and  a  brown  cap. 
Then  comes  a  man  with  green  boots  leading  a  brown  horse. 

Similar  quiet  pictures  are  found  on  the  other  two  walls 
of  the  tomb  ;  on  the  back  wall  a  man  is  standing  with  his  arm 
round  a  young  flute-player's  neck,  and  is  greeted  by  a  woman. 
The  dress  of  the  women  is  Etruscan ;  the  subjects  also  are 
probably  Etruscan — ^the  preparations  for  the  pompa  and  the 
dancing  feast.  But  everything  breathes  coolness  and  calm, 
and  we  miss  the  usual  jollity.  The  technique  is  equally 
remarkable.  It  is  not  the  usual  fresco  painting  :  experiments 
have  been  made  with  size-paint,  that  is,  an  attempt  at  painting 
in  distemper  on  the  plaster  stucco  covering  the  walls.  The 
attempt  has  failed  ;  the  colour  has  run  in  large  blotches. 

These  two  characteristics  of  the  artist  of  the  Tomba  del 
Barone  are  of  great  interest  because  the  German  archaeologist, 
Gustav  Korte,  has  demonstrated  the  existence  of  marks  made 
by  Greek  artisans  on  the  walls  of  this  tomb.  It  was  not  in 
Etruscan,  but  in  Greek  letters  that  the  artist  indicated  the 
amount  of  his  day's  work,  with  a  view  to  his  wages.  The 
explanation,  then,  seems  to  be  the  following  :  a  Greek 
decorator  was  charged  with  the  task  of  ornamenting  the  walls 
of  the  tomb,  and  he  did  it,  as  far  as  the  dresses  are  concerned, 
according  to  local  tradition  ;  but  he  experimented  boldly  with 
a  new  technical  process,  the  success  of  which  was  prevented 
by  the  dampness  of  the  rock-wall ;  and  he  composed  his 
pictures  with  a  grandeur  of  line  and  a  tranquillity  in  execution 
which  make  one  think  of  the  pediment  of  a  Greek  temple. 
In  the  light  of  this  it  is  easier  to  realize  how  much  of  the 
Etruscan  temperament  there  really  is  in  the  other  paintings, 
all  Greek  influence  on  style  notwithstanding.  It  must  be 
noted  here  that  artisans'  marks  are  the  only  written  evidence 
left  by  the  decorative  painters  of  Etruria  ;  artists'  signatures 
are  unknown,  whether  in  Greek  or  in  Etruscan.  The  Etruscan 
nobles,  like  the  Roman  later,  evidently  employed  Greek 
artists,  but  granted  them  no  social  position. 


22  TOMBADELLEBIGHE 


VII 

In  the  next  period  the  predominant  stylistic  influence  is 
Attic.  A  whole  group  of  tombs  dates  from  about  500  b.  c.  : 
they  are  thus  contemporaneous  with  the  severe  red-figured 
vase-paintings.  Very  Attic  and,  at  the  same  time,  like  a 
complete  pictorial  procession,  representing  everything  which 
took  place  at  a  great  Etruscan  funeral,  is  the  Tomba  delle 
Bighe,  previously  mentioned  and  now  published  by  Weege. 
As  the  pictures  in  this  tomb  are  clearer  and  more  complete 
than  most  Etruscan  paintings,  we  will  take  some  of  them  as 
a  starting-point  for  a  closer  examination  of  the  facts  of 
Etruscan  life. 

There  are  two  friezes  on  the  three  walls  of  the  tomb  :  a 
narrower  and  lighter  above  ;  and  a  broader  one  below,  in 
which  the  figures  are  painted  on  a  deep  red  ground  ;  the 
height  of  the  friezes  is  respectively  36  and  90  cm.,  and  they 
are  separated  by  a  broad,  coloured  band.  The  narrow  frieze 
with  the  dark  figures  on  light  ground  still  reminds  one  of  the 
black-figured  Attic  vases,  whereas  the  lower  purple  frieze,  in 
which  the  skin  of  the  men  is  reserved  in  a  somewhat  lighter 
red,  that  of  the  women  in  white,  recalls  the  red-figured  vase- 
paintings,  all  differences  notwithstanding. 

On  the  right-hand  main  wall  (fig.  15),  in  the  broad  frieze, 
men  and  women  are  dancing  in  honour  of  the  dead  among 
laurel  branches.  There  are  the  usual  ecstasy  and  the  familiar 
animated  gestures  with  the  big  fan-like  hands,  reminding  one 
of  the  figures  in  archaic  Greek  vase-painting  and  plastic  art.^ 

Especially  splendid  is  the  female  flute-player  who  turns 
round  as  she  dances,  her  light  chiton  and  red  cloak  fluttering 
about  her  ;  she  can  almost  compare  with  '  la  bella  ballerina  *. 
The  dancing-women  all  wear  the  high  Etruscan  wreathed 
cap,  the  so-called  tutulus,  which  in  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni 
is  also  worn  by  a  male  dancer.  We  meet  with  it  again  in 
Etruscan  terracotta  sculpture.  The  fashion  is  of  Oriental 
^  Cp.  Fr.  Poulsen,  Delphi,  fig.  44. 


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THE  TUTU  LUS— CHARIOT  RACE    23 

origin,  and  goes  back,  ultimately,  to  the  pointed  *  sugar-loaf 
hat '  of  the  Hittites.  It  probably  reached  Etruria  by  way  of 
Cyprus,  where  it  is  frequently  seen  in  reliefs  of  the  seventh 
century  B.  c.  In  Etruria  the  pointed  woollen  cap  became 
part  of  the  national  dress  .^  Rome  of  course  adopted  the 
headgear  and  preserved  the  Etruscan  tradition  in  the  priest- 
hoods ;  a  purple  tutulus  adorned  the  Roman  Flaminicae,  and 
certain  secondary  priests  wore  a  tutulus  down  to  the  time  of 
Tertullian.*  In  early  Rome  all  women  wore  the  tutulus,  and 
under  it  a  head-cloth  such  as  is  shown  in  Etruscan  terracottas 
(fig.  16)  ;  this  is  clear  from  a  description  of  a  Roman  mourning 
scene  in  Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus  (xi.  39),  where  the  women 
tear  their  many  and  various  fillets  and  hair-ornaments  off 
their  heads  ,^ 

The  dancing  scene,  in  the  painted  frieze  referred  to  above 
(fig.  15),  ends  at  the  sideboard  on  the  left,  which  bears  a 
number  of  metal  bowls  :  a  cup-bearer,  partially  obliterated  in 
the  original,  is  just  putting  down  a  vessel.  The  wine  to  inspire 
the  dancers  is  ready. 

In  the  narrow  frieze — the  most  beautiful  and  most  care- 
fully executed  of  those  in  the  tomb,  but  very  badly  copied  in 
the  facsimile  of  the  Glyptotek — ^we  see  the  preparations  for 
a  chariot  race.  The  horses  are  being  led  out  and  harnessed 
to  the  chariot.  We  reproduce,  after  Stackelberg's  drawing, 
the  most  interesting  part  of  the  frieze  (fig.  17),  in  which  three 
young  men  are  busy  harnessing  two  horses  to  the  light,  two- 
wheeled  chariot,  the  Biga.  The  chariot  is  represented  in 
foreshortening,  and  the  shaft  is  lifted  up  by  a  naked  boy. 
The  young  men  have  each  one  foot  strongly  foreshortened. 

^  Daremberg-Saglio,  s.  v.   Tutulus.  catinum),  corresponding  to  the  Etrus- 

Fr.  Poulsen,  Der  Orient  und  die  friih-  can    bucchero    vases,    at    sacrifices. 

^necA.  ^M«i^  p.  97,  fig.  99,  and  p.  107.  Livy  i.  24.  9  :   Juvenal  vi.  343.    Cp. 

Martha,  Uart  etrusque,  p.  306,  fig.  206  Miiller-Deecke,  Die  Etrusker  ii.  p.  275. 

(Cyprus).    Antike  Denkmdler  iii,  pi.  i.  ^  nrhg  Latin  name  of  the  head-cloth 

*  In  the  same  manner  the  Roman  is  struppus,  and  from  that  a  festival  at 

priests  used  flint  knives  in  their  cult,  Falerii,  struppearia,  derived  its  name, 

and  their  razors  had  to  be  of  copper,  It  comes  from  Ionia,  and  is  mentioned 

and,  as  late  as  Roman  imperial  in  the  poems  of  Sappho  (xetpo'/xaKrpov). 
times,  they  used  black  vessels  {nigrum 


24  TOMBADELLEBIGHE 

We  find  here  the  same  experimentation  with  this  new  and 
difficult  problem,  as  in  the  Greek  vase-paintings  of  about 
500  B.  c,  in  the  vases  of  Euthymides  and  Euphronius.  The 
horse  to  the  right  is  blue,  that  to  the  left  grey,  both  have  red 
hoofs  and  red  harness,  and  two  youths,  with  a  sort  of  shawl 
round  their  loins,  are  busily  engaged  with  them,  striking 
them  on  the  flanks  to  get  them  into  place.  These  two  excel- 
lent figures  are  quite  misdrawn  and  misconstrued  in  the 
Ny  Carlsberg  facsimile,  the  draughtsman  not  having  realized 
that  they  are  seen  from  behind. 

We  have,  therefore,  preparations  for  a  chariot  race  ;  in 
a  wall-painting  in  the  Tomba  del  Morente  at  Corneto  we 
have  a  still  earlier  phase  represented,  the  lassoing  of  the 
horse  which  is  to  be  harnessed  (fig.  18)  ;  here  the  horse  is 
red,  with  blue  mane  and  tail.  The  disposition  of  the  colours 
is  no  more  naturalistic  in  Etruscan  wall-painting  than  in  the 
pediments  of  Greek  temples  :  in  applying  the  colours,  the 
painter's  object  was  purely  decorative. 

After  the  preparations  comes  the  ceremonial  parade  of 
the  racing  chariots  past  the  stands  ;  three  chariots  are  seen 
in  a  row  (fig.  15) :  the  first  has  not  yet  begun  to  move, 
the  horses  are  pawing  the  ground  impatiently,  and  the  groom 
is  standing  at  their  heads  trying  to  pacify  them  ;  the  second 
chariot  has  already  started,  and  the  team  of  the  third  chariot 
is  going  a  little  faster,  a  fine  crescendo  which  reminds  one  of 
good  Greek  art  rather  than  of  Etruscan.  To  the  left  are  the 
stands  for  the  spectators,  which  are  continued  on  the  back 
wall ;  similar  stands  are  seen  in  the  corner  where  back  wall 
and  left  main  wall  adjoin.  We  give,  after  Stackelberg's 
drawing,  the  two  parts  from  the  first-mentioned  corner 
(fig.  19).  On  elevated  platforms,  bounded  above  by  lines 
evidently  meant  to  indicate  curtains  which  might  be  drawn 
before  the  '  box  '  against  sun  or  heavy  showers,  men  and 
women  are  seated  and  show  their  absorption  in  the  games 
by  their  eager  gestures.  The  foremost  woman  to  the  right 
actually  greets  the  procession  of  chariots  with  her  raised 
hand.    She  is  a  matron  wearing  a  shawl  (epiblema)  over  the 


Fig.   i8.     WALL-PAINTING    FROJM   THE   TOMBA   DEL    MORENTE 
THE    LASSOING    OF    THE    HORSE 


Fig.  19.     PART    OF    THE    SMALL    FRIEZE   IN   THE    TOMBA   DELLE   BIGHE 

After  Arch.  Jahrb.   19 16 


Fig.  20.     PART    OF   THE   TOMBA  BELLA    SCIMMIA 
AT    CHIUSI 


THE  AUDIENCE  25 

arms,  and  the  back  of  her  head,  and  under  that  a  tutulus.  Next 
to  her  sits  a  young  girl  with  a  tutulus,  noble  in  bearing  and 
gesture  like  a  young  goddess.  Then  follows  a  varied  company 
of  youths,  women,  and  a  bearded  man.  The  young  man,  who  is 
represented  partly  frontal  with  his  chin  resting  on  his  hand 
and  the  head  and  left  leg  frontal,  is  of  special  interest.  The 
problem  of  foreshortening  has  been  very  neatly  solved.  Under 
the  wooden  floor  of  the  stands  the  common  folk  are  disporting 
themselves,  some  of  them  engrossed  in  anything  but  the 
games. 

In  order  to  understand  the  significance  of  this  representa- 
tion one  has  to  realize  that  such  detailed  pictures  of  spectators 
at  athletic  games  are  unknown  in  Greek  art.  The  nearest 
parallel  is  the  assembly  of  the  gods,  the  Olympian  specta- 
tors, in  the  frieze  of  the  Treasury  of  the  Siphnians  at 
Delphi,^  and  in  the  Parthenon  frieze,  between  which  the 
Tomba  delle  Bighe  chronologically  occupies  an  intermediate 
position,  about  twenty-five  years  later  than  the  former,  and 
about  fifty  years  earlier  than  the  latter.  At  the  same  time  we 
learn  that  female  spectators  were  also  present ;  this  was  not 
so  at  the  Olympic  games,  but  seems  to  have  been  a  common 
Italic  custom.  The  stands,  too,  appear  typically  Italic ; 
on  such  tKpM  the  spectators  were  seated  at  those  athletic 
games  and  contests  which  in  earlier  times,  according  to 
Vitruvius  (v.  i),  were  held  in  the  market-places  of  Italian 
towns.  Amphitheatres  were  not  known  till  the  first  cen- 
tury B.C.,  but  if  one  imagines  these  market-places  on  festival 
days  with  such  wooden  stands  built  up  on  all  four  sides,  and 
these  stands  curved  round  at  the  corners  in  order  that  the 
spectators  might  see  better,  one  can  understand  how  the 
shape  of  the  amphitheatre  originated.^ 

Within  the  sphere  of  Etruscan  painting  also,  this  is  the 
only  large  representation  of  an  audience.  Elsewhere  the 
artist  limited  himself  to  the  individual  figure  as  representative 
of  the  spectators  ;    thus  in  the  Tomba  della  Scimmia  (the 

^  Fr.  Poulsen,  Delphi,  fig.  44. 

^  Cp.  Daremberg-Saglio  and  Pauly-Wissowa,  s.  v.  Amphitheatrum. 

2468  £ 


26      TOMBA  DELLA  SCIMMIA  AT  CHIUSI 

Monkey  Tomb)  at  Chiusi,  the  only  spectator  is  a  lady  dressed 
in  black  and  sheltered  by  a  sunshade  ;  she  is  seated  on  a  high 
chair  without  a  back  (diphros),  her  feet  on  a  footstool  (fig.  20). 
The  tomb  was  discovered  in  1846  by  Fran9ois.  The  pictures 
are  executed  in  a  thin  colour,  probably  a  sort  of  water-colour, 
applied  directly  to  the  stone  without  an  intermediate  layer 
of  stucco  ;  a  similar  technique  is  employed  in  the  other  and 
larger  tomb  at  Chiusi,  the  Tomba  Casuccini.  The  four 
walls  are  decorated  with  scenes  from  the  race-course  and  the 
palaestra.  Behind  the  lady  on  the  wall  which  is  reproduced, 
we  see  two  men  in  rapid  motion  and  with  ample  gestures 
probably  intended  to  render  the  bustle  and  hurry  at  the 
funeral,  which  is  also  represented,  as  we  have  seen,  by  one 
of  the  figures  in  the  Augur  tomb  (cp.  fig.  4).  The  sunshade 
carried  by  the  '  widow  '  was  an  Oriental  fashion,  but  in  the 
fifth  century  B.C.  the  women  of  Greece  had  adopted  it, 
as  is  shown  by  the  Knights  of  Aristophanes  (1.  1348 
o-KiaSeioi').  To  the  left  the  usual  flute-player  is  standing, 
and  the  round  dais  in  front  of  him  is  not  an  altar,  but,  as 
Milani  was  the  first  to  point  out,  the  small  table  on  which 
prizes  were  placed.^  Next  comes  a  girl  with  a  censer  on  her 
head.  She  is  generally  taken  to  be  a  female  juggler,  but 
carrying  a  tall  object  on  one's  head  is  still  a  common  practice 
with  the  women  of  the  South,  and  censers  (thymiateria),  as 
we  learn  from  Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus,  were  always 
carried  at  the  '  pompae  '  in  early  Rome ;  at  the  high  festivals 
they  were  placed  in  front  of  the  Roman  doorways.^  They 
were  sometimes  of  costly  material.^  But  our  woman  seems 
to  be  standing  on  a  platform,  and  the  near  presence  of  the 
flute-player,  and  the  turning  of  her  body  and  position  of  her 
arms,  seem  to  indicate  some  difficult  dance  performed  with 
the  big  object  borne  on  her  head  in  a  small,  limited  space ; 
hence  a  kind  of  old  Etruscan  dervish-dance  of  which  we 
have  no  other  knowledge.  The  two  figures  next  to  her  are 
a  big  and  a  small  man  who  are  cooling  their  bleeding  noses 

^  Museo  archeol.  di  Firenze,  p.  303.        ^  Cicero,  In    Verrem  iv.   46.     See 
^  Livy  xxix.  14.  13.  also  Karl  Wigand,  Thymiateria. 


TOMBADELLEBIGHE  27 

with  sponges  :  the  artist  gives  the  atmosphere  of  the  scene 
after  the  fight.  On  one  of  the  other  walls  in  this  tomb  the 
boxers  are  ready  for  action,  raising  their  cestus-bound  fists 
against  each  other,  one  hand  closed  for  attack,  the  other  open 
for  defence,  as  frequently  described  in  the  ancient  authors.^ 
Cicero  tells  us  that  boxers  sighed  and  groaned,  in  order  to 
increase  the  force  of  the  blow.^  These  cestus  fights  must  have 
been  terrible.  The  guard,  nowadays  less,  was  then  more 
important  than  the  blow,  for  it  was  too  dangerous  to  take  the 
risk  of  being  hit  by  one's  opponent  when  attacking  him, 
even  if  one  was  confident  that  one's  own  blow  would  be  the 
harder  ;  one  had  to  play  for  an  opening,  at  the  same  time 
guarding  against  the  single  blow  which  was  sufficient  to 
knock  a  man  out.  Finally,  on  the  extreme  left  of  the  picture 
(fig.  20)  we  meet  with  a  scene  which  is  repeated  in  another 
picture  in  the  same  tomb,  as  well  as  in  the  Tomba  del  Tri- 
clinio  :  a  rider  seated  sideways  and  at  the  same  time  leading 
another  horse.  The  race  with  a  led  horse  was  an  Oriental 
custom,  and  appears  for  the  first  time  on  the  Phoenician  metal 
bowls  of  the  eighth  and  seventh  centuries  B.C.  This  seat, 
sideways  on  the  horse,  is  of  Scythian  origin,  and  in  Greek  art 
usually  characterizes  the  Amazons.  The  Etruscans,  with 
their  passion  for  difficult  games,  evidently  combined  the  two 
in  order  to  make  the  races  as  exciting  as  possible. 

In  the  small  frieze  on  the  back  wall  of  the  Tomba  delle 
Bighe  we  find  a  rider  with  a  led  horse,  dressed  in  tunic  and 
helmet,  and  seated  astride  ;  we  reproduce  part  of  it  after 
Stackelberg's  water-colour  (fig.  21).  To  the  left  of  him  we 
see  a  naked  man  standing  on  one  leg  and  nursing  his  raised 
left  leg.  It  was  formerly  conjectured  that  he  was  playing 
leap-frog  with  the  young  man  planting  the  jumping-pole  in 
the  ground  behind  him,  but  it  is  not  usual  to  play  leap-frog 
on  one  leg,  and  Weege  has  pointed  out  the  same  position  in 
athletic  scenes  on  Greek  vases  and  supposes  it  to  be  a  kind 
of  preparatory  exercise.     His  supposition  is  correct  :    any 

^  For  instance  in  ApoUonius  Rho-        ^  Cicero,    Tusculanae   disputationes 
dius,  Argonautica  ii.  68.  ii.  56. 


28  PALAESTRA  LIFE 

modern  acrobat  would  recognize  it  as  one  of  his  exercises ;  the 
contraction  of  the  muscles  by  nursing  right  and  left  knee  in 
turn.  Acrobats  practise  this  exercise  when  travelling,  to  keep 
themselves  fit  when  they  are  unable  to  train. 


VIII 

We  will  not  dwell  on  all  the  forms  of  wrestling  contests 
and  boxing  matches  which  appear  in  the  small  frieze  of  the 
Bighe  tomb,  but  only  describe  a  part  of  the  left  main  wall, 
which  presents  an  important  and  difficult  problem  (fig.  22). 
To  the  left  of  a  young  man  in  a  himation  (not  reproduced) 
we  see  the  lower  part  of  a  statue  of  a  deity,  who  would  seem, 
from  the  faint  traces  in  Stackelberg's  water-colour,  to  have 
wings  on  his  ankles.  If  so,  it  is  Hermes,  the  protector  of  the 
palaestra,  and  the  black  object  in  front  of  him  is  a  small  altar. 
On  the  other  side  of  the  altar  a  boy,  accompanied  by  one  of 
the  caretakers  of  the  palaestra,  clad  in  a  blue  mantle  and 
carrying  a  knotted  stick,  is  standing  with  his  hand  raised. 
This  usually  indicates  the  adorer  praying  to  the  divinity  for 
victory  in  the  contest.  An  absolutely  Greek  palaestra  interior! 
We  have  now  escaped  from  the  sphere  of  the  customary  rude 
games  held  at  the  Etruscan  funerals,  and  the  question  arises 
whether  the  Etruscan  knew  real  palaestra  life  of  the  Greek 
type  or  not.  In  the  Oscan  towns  of  Lucania  and  Campania 
the  youths  were  devoted  to  Greek  sports,  and  Weege  is 
therefore  inclined,  in  view  especially  of  this  picture,  to 
believe  the  same  of  the  nobles  of  Etruria  at  the  height  of 
their  glory  in  the  sixth  and  fifth  centuries  B.C.  But  this  is 
a  dangerous  inference.  Wherever  else  we  meet  with  Etruscan 
athletic  types  they  are  rough  and  lumbering  of  build  and 
evidently  professionals.  In  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe  a  Greek 
artist  has  been  at  work  ;  this  was  already  admitted  by 
Stackelberg  and  Kestner,  and  the  same  view  is  held  in 
our  own  times.  Although  the  artist  has  complied  with  the 
demands  of  his  patron  more  fully  than  the  Greek  artist  in 


PALAESTRA  LIFE  29 

the  Tomba  del  Barone,  who  only  troubled  himself  to  do  so 
as  far  as  dress  was  concerned,  but  for  the  rest  painted  entirely 
in  the  spirit  of  his  native  country,  Greek  influence,  neverthe- 
less, has  penetrated  everywhere.  It  is  seen,  for  instance,  in 
the  incongruities  of  the  picture  :  the  spectators  in  the  corners, 
suggesting  actual  athletic  games;  then  this  interior  from  a 
Greek  palaestra,  which  might  be  interpreted,  however,  as 
part  of  a  public  contest ;  next  comes  the  prize  table,  as  in 
the  Tomba  della  Scimmia,  but  on  both  sides  himation-clad 
boys  are  seen,  loitering  like  typical  figures  of  the  everyday 
life  of  the  palaestra,  who  have  absolutely  nothing  to  do  with 
the  concentrated  excitement  of  the  sports  in  the  arena.  To 
the  left  of  the  low  table  we  see  a  little  armed  dancer,  with 
helmet,  shield,  and  spear,  in  Greek  nudity,  not  fully  dressed  like 
the  gladiator  in  the  Tomba  della  Scimmia  ;  his  lance  is  bent 
zigzag- wise,  apparently  an  Etruscan  peculiarity.  With  the 
Greeks  also,  the  armed  dance — the  pyrrhiche — formed  part 
of  the  sepulchral  festival,  especially  in  Cyprus  and  Crete, 
where  it  was  called  prylis ;  ^  and  the  custom  may  very  well 
have  been  adopted  by  the  Etruscans. 


IX 

Similar  incongruities,  due  to  Greek  artists,  or  at  any  rate 
Greek  art,  having  set  a  Greek  stamp  on  the  wall-painting  of 
Etruria,  meet  us  in  the  representations  of  symposia.  Again 
we  can  take  the  Bighe  tomb  as  our  starting-point  (fig.  23).^ 
Three  festive  couches  are  seen  with  two  young  men  on  each. 

^  Aristotle, /rog-m.  519  R.     Scholia  ready  badly  damaged  in  1837.    A  copy 

to  Homer's //ia<^  xxiii.  130.    A  similar  of  it,  now  in  the  Vatican,  is  mere 

dancer  or  armed  runner  appears  in  the  fiction,  and  has  unfortunately  served 

Tomba   Casuccini   at    Chiusi ;    both  as  basis  for  the  large  facsimile  in  the 

remind  us  in  posture  of  the  Tiibin-  Glyptotek.     On  the  other  hand,  its 

gen  armed  runner  (Bulle,  Der  schone  damaged  state  is  correctly  represented 

Mensch,  pi.  89).  in  the  small  drawing  of  the  tomb  in 

2  The    large   frieze   with    dancing  the  Glyptotek. 
scenes  on  the  left  main  wall  was  al- 


30     TOMBA  DELLE  BIGHE  SYMPOSIUM 

The  youths  are  naked  to  the  waist,  and  have  sumptuous  gold 
necklaces,  red  or  blue  mantles,  and  chaplets  on  their  heads. 
Some  of  them  hold  flat  drinking-bowls,  some  eggs,  and  others 
have  branches  in  their  hands — all  this,  however,  we  only 
learn  from  the  old  copies  :  they  are  reclining  on  metal 
couches,  whereas  the  tables  in  front  of  them  are  wooden,  as 
is  clearly  proved  by  the  colours  employed.  We  may  wonder 
that  the  couches  are  of  metal,  for  according  to  the  literary 
tradition  the  first  metal  couches  came  to  Rome  as  late  as 
187  B.C.  Nevertheless,  ivory  and  golden  couches  are  already 
mentioned  by  Plautus  ;  this  may,  however,  be  due  to  the 
Greek  text  on  which  he  based  his  comedy  {Stichus  377). 
The  Etruscans,  at  any  rate,  knew  bronze  couches  at  least 
three  hundred  years  earlier,  and  this  is  corroborated  by  the 
find  of  an  actual  bronze  banqueting-couch  in  a  tomb  at 
Corneto.^  The  couches  are  covered  with  many-coloured 
woven  or  embroidered  bolsters  and  cushions  ;  these  also 
are  mentioned  in  the  Roman  comedies  as  ornaments  of 
couches.^  Ducks  appear  beneath  the  couches,  and  the  guests 
are  attended  by  three  naked  lads  :  a  flute-player,  a  boy 
holding  a  branch,  and  another  with  a  ladle,  which  are  wrongly 
reproduced  in  the  Ny  Carlsberg  facsimile  as  a  staff. 

The  symposium  has  begun,  the  tables  having  been  cleared. 
Only  young  beardless  men  are  seen  feasting  together,  and 
nothing  informs  us  who  they  are  or  why  they  are  drinking. 
All  that  is  certain  is  the  luxury  and  pomp  which  seem  to  have 
characterized  Etruscan  houses  and  which  are  especially  mani- 
fest in  the  jingling  necklaces  and  the  material  and  appointment 
of  the  festive  couch. 

New  problems  arise  with  the  large  symposium  scene  in 
the  Tomba  dei  Leopardi  at  Corneto,  which  was  discovered  in 
1875  and  has  now  been  described  in  an  exemplary  manner 

^  Bliimner,    Romische    Privatalter-  referred    to    by   Plautus    (Pseudolus 

turner,  p.  118.  145  ff.).      They   usually   came   from 

^  On  Etruscan  cinerary  urns  and  Alexandria  and  were  decorated  with 
terracotta  sarcophagi  the  covers  are  pictures  of  wild  beasts,  whereas  the 
as  a  rule  strongly  scalloped.  These  bed  coverlets  proper  came  from  Cam- 
are  presumably  the  tonsilia  tappetia  pania. 


Fig.  24 

BACK    WALL    IN    THE    TOMBA    DEI    LEOPARDI 

After  Arch.  Jahrb.    1916,  pi.   9 


Fig.   25 
MARRIED  COUPLE   ON  AN   ETRUSCAN   CINERARY   URN 


TO  MBA  DEI  LEOPARDI— HUNTING  LEOPARDS    31 

by  Weege  in  the  article  mentioned  above.  The  pictures  are 
among  the  best  preserved  in  the  whole  of  Etruria,  and  date 
from  about  the  same  time  as  the  Bighe  tomb,  about  500  B.C. 
The  tomb  takes  its  name  from  the  two  almost  life-sized 
leopards  in  the  pediment  (fig.  24).  They  have  been  neatly 
proved  by  Weege  to  be  hunting  leopards.  As  early  as  the 
days  of  ancient  Egypt  leopards  were  trained  for  hunting  pur- 
poses, and  hunting  leopards  appear  in  Greek  vase-paintings 
and  Etruscan  wall-paintings,  for  instance,  in  the  earlier 
tombs  such  as  the  Tomba  delle  Leonesse  and  the  Tomba  del 
Triclinio,  where  the  animal  lies  beneath  a  couch.  In  the 
Middle  Ages  the  hunting  leopard  was  still  trained  in  the 
East,  and  is  therefore  depicted  in  the  paintings  of  the  Renais- 
sance— for  instance  in  the  pictures  of  Gentile  da  Fabriano 
and  Benozzo  Gozzoli — as  seated  on  the  cruppers  of  the  horses 
behind  the  Magi  or  their  servants.^  In  modern  India  leopards 
are  still  trained  to  hunt. 

Beneath  the  two  long-bodied  hunting  leopards  we  see  the 
main  picture  of  the  back  wall  (fig.  24)  representing  a  sympo- 
sium. On  the  couch  to  the  left  two  youths  are  reclining,  on 
each  of  the  two  others  a  youth  and  a  young  girl.^  The  young 
men  are  attired  in  mantles,  the  girls  in  chitons  and  mantles  ; 
all  wear  garlands.  In  their  hands  they  hold  either  chaplets, 
drinking-bowls,  or  round  objects  usually  supposed  to  be 
eggs.  Similar  '  eggs  '  appear  in  numerous  Etruscan  ban- 
queting-scenes  :  in  the  Tombe  del  Triclinio,  del  Letto 
funebre,  della  Pulcella,  degli  Scudi,  &c.,  and  as  egg-shells 
are  frequently  found  in  the  tombs  at  Corneto,  and  eggs  must 
therefore  have  been  offered  to  the  dead  ^ — as  the  most 
nourishing  of  foods,  and  one  which  stimulates  in  particular 

^  These  cheetahs  were  brought  alive  I  owe  this  reference  to  Mr.  G.  F.  Hill, 

to  Italy,  if  not  actually  used  for  hunt-  ^  Dennis  and  Stryk  are  mistaken  in 

ing  by  the  princes  of  the  Renaissance,  speaking  of  a  youth  and  a  girl  on  the 

For  among  Pisanello's  drawings  in  the  left  couch  ;    the  error  is  due  to  the 

Codex  Vallardi  in  the  Louvre  is  a  fine  damaged  condition  of  the  colouring, 

study  of  one  of  these  animals  from  the  ^  Cp.  Juvenal,  Satires  v.  82,  where 

life  ;  it  wears  a  collar  round  its  neck,  eggs  are  referred  to  as   a  common 

showing  that  it  was  led  on  a  leash,  course  at  funerals. 


32  TOMBADEILEOPARDI 

the  procreative  force — it  is  not  improbable  that  the  old 
interpretation  is  the  correct  one.  Weege  supposes  them  to 
be  ballot-balls  used  to  decide  who  should  be  the  master  of 
the  symposium  (symposiarch),  but  this  was  usually  decided 
by  throwing  dice.  A  third  conceivable  interpretation,  which 
I  think  might  be  acceptable  in  certain  cases  where  a  man 
and  a  woman  hand  each  other  these  round  objects,  is  that 
they  are  rings.  In  Plautus's  Asinaria  (778)  it  is  spoken 
of  as  typical  of  two  young  lovers  reclining  on  one  couch  at  the 
symposium  that  one  of  them  gives  the  other  his  or  her  ring  to 
look  at. 

Beneath  and  above  the  banqueting-couch  we  find  the 
previously  noted  laurel  branches — not  laurel  trees  as  Weege 
calls  them — the  familiar  adornment  of  the  walls.  The  guests 
are  served  by  two  naked  pages :  one  of  these,  who  holds 
a  jug,  beckons  to  the  other,  who  holds  a  small  jug  and 
a  strainer,  to  make  haste.  How  necessary  it  was  to  strain  the 
wine  is  seen  from  the  description  of  the  elder  Cato.  The 
Latin  word  for  cleaning  the  wine-jars  of  the  grape-skins 
deposited  by  the  wine  is  deacinare} 

X 

This  wall-painting  is  apparently  a  faithful  copy  of  a 
Greek  painted  representation  of  a  symposium  with  hetaerae, 
and  this  is  also  Weege's  view  of  the  scene.  In  his  opinion, 
those  who  take  part  in  the  drinking  bouts  of  the  young  men 
are  not  married  or  respectable  women,  but  hetaerae.  It 
seems  to  me  that  such  a  representation  in  a  tomh  would 
argue  a  complete  dissolution  of  family  relations  in  ancient 
Etruria,  whether  we  choose  to  interpret  the  pictures  as  scenes 
from  life,  or  as  an  expression  of  the  wish  that  the  next  life 
might  take  the  form  of  nothing  more  or  less  than  a  revel  with 
hetaerae.  Weege  maintains,  further,  that  hetaerae  reclined 
at  table,  whereas  wives  sat  with  their  husbands :  but  this  is 

^  Cato,  De  re  rustica  26.     In  the  Greek  pictures  of  symposia  also  the  slave 
boy  carries  a  strainer,  -ndixos. 


THE  HETAERAE  33 

contrary  to  the  express  literary  tradition,  according  to  which 
the  Greeks  were  shocked  because  the  Etruscan  women 
reclined  at  table  with  men  '  under  the  same  coverlet  *.  The 
earliest  authority  for  this  statement  is  Aristotle  ^  and,  accord- 
ing to  this  and  other  accounts  of  the  fourth  century  B.C.,  the 
free  intercourse  between  men  and  women  gave  rise  to  much 
immorality,  the  women  abandoning  themselves  to  the  strange 
men  with  whom  they  reclined  .^  It  would  have  been  absurd 
for  the  Greeks  to  taJce  oifence  at  this  if  it  did  not  apply  to 
free-born  women  of  good  family,  but  only  to  hetaerae,  who 
in  Hellas  did  exactly  the  same.  How  things  were  with  the 
Greeks  in  this  respect  is  made  sufficiently  clear  by  a  passage 
in  the  orator  Isaeus  * :  '  No  one  would  dare  to  serenade 
married  women,  and  neither  do  the  married  women  attend 
banquets  with  their  husbands,  nor  do  they  consider  it  proper 
to  partake  of  meals  with  strangers,  especially  chance  acquam- 
tances.' 

With  this  severe  Athenian  custom  we  must  compare  these 
scandalized  Greek  outbursts,  and,  at  the  same  time,  we  must 
remember  that  in  the  fourth  century  B.C.  Etruscan  civilization 
and  morals  were  already  on  the  decline,  so  that  an  original 
latitude,  which  in  the  beginning  of  the  fifth  century  was 
natural  and  did  not  affect  the  morals  of  domestic  life,  may 
at  this  time  have  been  abused.  Incidentally,  we  are  able  to 
ascertain  the  degree  of  exaggeration  in  another  Greek  account 
of  the  same  time  concerning  the  luxuriousness  of  the  Etrus- 
cans * :  '  They  reclined  on  flowered  cushions  drinking  out  of 
sumptuous  silver  bowls  and  attended  by  servants  in  costly 
dresses,  sometimes  by  naked  zconien.*  In  the  Etruscan  paintings 
there  are  numerous  naked  pages  in  attendance,  just  as  in  the 
Greek  symposium  pictures,  but  not  a  single  naked  handmaid. 
As  to  the  question  whether  respectable  women  reclined  or 

^  Athenaeus  i.  23  d.    OntheEtrus-  -  Athenaeusxii.  siyd.   Cp.Dionys. 

can  custom  of  reclining  at  table,  like  Halic.  ix.  i6. 

the  Greeks,  and  unlike  the  men  of  the  ^  Isaeus  iii.  14. 

Homeric   age   and   later  the   Mace-  *  Athenaeus  iv.  153  d.  (=Timaeus, 

donians,  who  sat,  see  Athenaeus  i.  fragm.  18  in  Miiller,  Fragmenta  histor. 

17  f,  18  a.  Graecorum). 

a468  F 


34  THEHETAERAE 

sat  at  table,  invariable  rules  did  not  exist  in  Etruria  any  more 
than  they  existed  in  ancient  Rome,  where  we  know  that 
Jupiter  alone  reclined  at  the  lectisternia  (the  sacred  banquets 
given  by  the  state)  whereas  Juno  and  Minerva  sat ;  further- 
more, in  the  last  century  of  the  republic,  respectable  women 
sat  with  the  men  at  banquets,  while  brides  reclined.^  The 
practice  of  brides  reclining  can  hardly,  however,  be  accounted 
for  except  as  a  case  of  adherence  to  an  ancient  and  honourable 
custom  which  was  superseded  by  later  and  severer  notions. 

Etruscan  works  of  art,  however,  give  sufficient  information 
to  confute  the  whole  of  Weege's  hetaera  theory.  Man  and 
woman  are  often  seen  reclining  together  on  Etruscan  sarco- 
phagi and  cinerary  urns,  and  on  the  face  of  it  it  would  seem 
improbable  that  a  man  would  have  himself  pictured  on  his 
sarcophagus  with  a  hetaera.  Dr.  S.  P.  Cortsen  kindly  informs 
me  that  this  view  is  confirmed  by  the  fact  that  two  of  these 
cinerary  urns  with  a  pair  of  figures  on  the  lid  have  an  inscrip- 
tion in  which  the  word  tusurthi  or  tusurthir  occurs — one  of 
the  few  Etruscan  words  the  signification  of  which  is  certain  : 
it  means '  spouses  '.^  And  if  we  look  at  the  type  of  womanhood 
represented  in  several  of  the  recumbent  couples  on  the  later 
urns,  when  realism  prevails  in  Etruscan  portrait  sculpture, 
the  appellation  hetaera  becomes  as  preposterous  as  that  of 
matrons  is  certain  (fig.  25).^ 

But  proof  is  furnished  by  the  tomb -paintings  themselves. 
In  the  Tomba  degli  Scudi  at  Corneto,  discovered  in  1870, 
and,  to  judge  by  the  style,  dating  from  the  end  of  the  fifth 
century  b.  c,  the  wife  (as  might  be  expected)  is  pictured 
sitting  with  her  husband,  who  is  reclining  on  the  couch  with 

^  Friedlander,  Sittengeschichte  Rotns  scandaleuses.     Of  equal  value  is  his 

i.  472,  478,  493  f.  information  that  the  Sybarites  loved 

^  Corpus  inscriptionum  Etruscarum,  the  Etruscans  because  of  their  luxu- 

3858,  3860.  riousness  (Athenaeus  xii.  519  b).    It 

'  The  Etruscan  character  for  im-  is  regrettable  that  Theophrastus'  work 

morality  is  chiefly  due  to  Theopompus  on  the  Etruscans  is  lost ;    it  would 

(Jragm.  222  in  Miiller,  Fragm.  hist,  have  provided  information  of  quite 

Graec.  i.  p.  315),  but  he  gives  similar  a  different  character.  (Cp.  the  Scholia 

descriptions  of  the  Thessalians,  and  to  Pindar,  Pythia  ii.  3.) 
seems  to  have  specialized  in  chroniques 


Fig.  26.     PICTURE   FROM   THE  TOMBA  DEGLI   SCUDI  AT   CORNETO 


Fig.  27.     PICTURE    FROM    THE    TOINIBA     DEGLI     SCUDI 
After  a  coloured  drawing  in  the  Helbig  Museum 


TOMBADEGLISCUDI  35 

a  drinking-bowl  in  his  left  hand,  his  right  resting  on  the 
woman's  shoulder  (fig.  26).  According  to  the  inscription  the 
man's  name  is  Velthur  Velcha,  that  of  the  woman  Ravnthu 
Aprthnai  (the  family  name  is  in  the  nominative  and  is  a 
woman's  name,  the  Latin  Abortennia  ;  so  the  family  of  the 
mother  was  the  more  distinguished).  The  figure  and  the 
diadem  of  the  woman  recall  those  of  the  Hera  Borghese 
and  determine  the  date  of  the  tomb.  On  the  table  in  front 
of  the  couch  are  a  bowl,  a  cake  (pyramts),  and  a  heap  of 
fruits :  or  they  may  be  the  '  ball-cakes  '  {spirae  or  spaeritae) 
referred  to  by  Cato  {De  agricultura  82).  At  the  foot  of 
the  couch  a  lyre-player  and  a  flute-player  accompany  the 
meal  with  music,  recalling  a  statement  of  Cicero's  ^  that  at 
banquets  in  early  Rome  the  sound  of  stringed  instruments 
and  flutes  was  deemed  indispensable.  On  the  whole,  it 
might  perhaps  be  as  well  to  abandon  all  theories  of  the  austere 
morals  of  early  Rome.  The  patrician  families  of  the  first 
centuries  of  the  republic  undoubtedly  lived  a  life  which  in 
pomp  and  luxury  vied  with  the  life  of  the  nobility  of  the 
Etruscan  towns.  Again,  in  the  painting  on  the  back  wall  of 
this  tomb,  where  the  recumbent  man  is  a  priest  (cechaneri), 
the  wife  is  seated  with  her  husband  (fig.  27).  As  to  the  priest- 
hood, it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  priestly  office  was 
hereditary  in  the  Etruscan  noble  families.  The  statue  of 
Juno  at  Veii,  for  instance,  might  only  be  touched  by  a  priest 
of  a  certain  family.^  It  was  especially  the  art  of  divination, 
however,  which  was  reserved  for  the  noblemen  and  their 
wives.'  Even  when  the  Romans  had  conquered  Etruria  they 
continued  to  support  the  efforts  of  the  Etruscans  to  confine 
initiation  into  the  art  of  divination  to  the  nobility.  Even 
Cicero,  in  his  book  on  the  ideal  State,  maintains  that  omens 
and  presages  must  be  submitted  to  haruspices,  and  the  nobles 
of  Etruria  must  teach  the  '  disciplina  '. 

In  the  pictures  of  the  Scudi  tomb  the  wife,  as  we  have 

1  De  oratore  iii.  197.  can  women  versed  in  divination  is  the 

^  Livy  V.  22.  5.  wise  but  guileful  Tanaquil,  who  played 

3  The  most  famous  of  all  the  Etrus-    a  political  part  in  Rome  :  Livy  i.  34. 


36  TOMBADELL'ORCO 

seen,  is  sitting.  But  in  the  Tomba  dei  Vasi  Dipinti,  besides 
a  man  and  a  woman,  two  children  are  present  at  the  sympo- 
sium, which  would  be  inconceivable  in  a  hetaera  picture ;  and 
in  a  picture  in  the  front  chamber  of  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo  at 
Corneto,  discovered  in  1868  and  dating  from  the  same  period 
as  the  Scudi  tomb,  there  are  traces  of  a  man  and  a  woman 
reclining  together,  and  the  inscription  informs  us  that  the 
woman  is  a  free-born  woman  named  Velia — the  family  name 
has  unfortunately  been  destroyed — and  that  she  is  married 
to  Amth  Velchas,  a  descendant  of  one  of  the  noblest  families 
in  Etruria  (fig.  28).  With  this,  then,  the  last  and  final  proof 
of  the  untenability  of  the  hetaera  theory  has  been  adduced  : 
this  woman,  whose  head  is  one  of  the  most  beautiful  in  the 
sepulchral  chambers  of  Etruria  (fig.  29),  reclines  with  her 
husband  on  the  couch  in  the  picture  in  the  tomb,  even  as  she 
was  buried  with  him  in  the  tomb  itself.  A  failure  to  appreciate 
this  fact  would  imply  a  complete  denial  of  Etruscan  family 
feeling  and  pride  of  race. 

The  dancing  women,  on  the  other  hand,  for  instance,  the 
woman  in  the  Tomba  delle  Leonesse  already  cited  above, 
and  another,  still  more  wanton,  who  in  the  Tomba  degli 
Bacchanti  foots  it  with  a  fat  dancer,  must  be  interpreted 
as  hetaerae.  They  illustrate  the  phrase  of  Plautus  :  '  pro- 
stibile  est  tandem  ?  stantem  stanti  savium  dare  amicum 
amicae  ? '  To  the  same  category  of  hired  dancers  belongs 
the  man  to  the  left  of  the  one  who  is  dancing  with  inverted 
cithara.^ 

Generally  speaking,  what  has  made  doubt  or  error  possible 
in  the  matter  is  the  fact  that  the  pictures,  as  we  have  already 
said,  in  form  suggest  Greek  pictures  of  hetaerae  ;  symposia 
of  any  other  kind  between  men  and  women  were  unknown  in 
Hellas.  And  to  what  extent  the  influence  of  Greek  art  has 
prevailed  is  shown  by  the  picture  of  a  momentary  phase  of 
emotion  in  the  Tomba  Querciola,  where  a  couple  reclining  on 
the  couch  are  kissing  each  other,  a  motive  as  suitable  to  a 

^  T^  Ki$dpav  aTp(\lfai,  like  Apollo  in  the  contest  with  Marsyas  (ApoUo- 
dorus,  Bibliotheca  i.  4.  2). 


'^6 


Fig.  28.      ARNTH    VELCHAS    AND    WIFE    ON    COUCH 

PICTURE    IN    THE    TOMBA    DELL'    ORCO 

After  a  coloured  drawing  in  the  Helbig  Museum 


Fig.  29-     HEAD    OF    ARNTH    VELCHAS'    WIFE 
FROM    THE    TOMBA    DELL'    ORCO 


Fig.   30.     BACK    WALL    IN    THE    TOMBA    DEL    VECCHIO 


SYMPOSIA  37 

Greek  hetaera  picture  as  it  is  incongruous  in  a  picture  repre- 
senting family  life  after  death  .^  Another  source  of  error  is 
the  pronounced  sensualism  of  these  pictures  ;  in  a  sepulchral 
painting  as  early  as  the  sixth  century,  the  main  picture  of  the 
Tomba  del  Vecchio,  we  see  on  a  banqueting-couch,  under 
the  wreaths  and  chap  lets  with  bells  hanging  on  the  wall,  a 
hoary  old  roue  in  vivacious  conversation  with  his  beautiful 
young  wife  who  holds  a  garland,  a  hypothymis,  under  his 
nose  (fig.  30) .^  This  picture  is  typically  Etruscan  in  its 
combination  of  wine  and  love.  *  As  soon  as  we  had  eaten,' 
sings  the  Greek  poet  Dromon,'  *  the  slave  girl  removed  the 
tables  ;  one  brought  us  water  for  washing,  and  we  washed 
ourselves  ;  then  we  seized  again  the  wreaths  of  violets  and 
bound  our  brows  with  garlands.'  The  Etruscans  seem  to  have 
followed  the  Greek  rules  minutely,  but  like  the  Egyptians 
they  let  the  free-born  women  partake  of  the  festivity  of  the 
symposium  itself. 

XI 

But  we  can  go  still  further  and  establish  beyond  the 
possibility  of  doubt  that  where  men  alone  are  gathered  at 
the  symposium  of  eternity,  the  pictures  represent  the  heads  of 
the  families  who  ordered  the  tombs  and  had  them  decorated. 
To  be  sure,  the  pictures  of  the  sixth  and  the  beginning  of 
the  fifth  centuries  do  not  give  us  any  information  as  to  this — 
even  the  symposium  in  the  Tomba  delle  Bighe  is  without 
inscription ;  but  in  this  respect  also  the  sepulchral  paintings 
become  more  communicative  after  the  middle  of  the  fifth 
century.    In  the  Tomba  Golini  at  Orvieto,  discovered  in  1863 

^  In  the  same  picture  we  also  find  them  round  their  necks,  as  we  learn 

a    representation    of   a    true    Greek  from  the  poems  of  Anacreon  and  Al- 

motive,  kottabos.    Another  momen-  caeus '   (Athenaeus  xv.  678  d).     Cp. 

tary  motive  appears  in  the  Tomba  'P\utaTch,Quaest.conviv.m.probl.i,2- 

d'  Orfeo    e    d'  Euridice    at    Corneto  In  Ionia  the  women  perfumed  their 

(Monumenti  v.  pi.  17),  a  slave  pulling  bosoms  and  wore  wreaths  of  flowers 

off  his  master's  slippers.  round  their '  delicate  necks ' ,  as  Sappho 

"  Hypothymides  were  first  used  'by  says  (Athenaeus  xv.  674  c-d). 

the  Aeolians  and  lonians  who  wore  ^  Athenaeus  ix.  409  e. 


38       TOMBAGOLINIATORVIETO 

and  called  after  its  discoverer,  and,  to  judge  from  its  style, 
contemporary  with  the  Tomba  degli  Scudi  and  the  front 
chamber  of  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo,  we  see  in  the  symposium 
on  the  back  wall  (fig.  31)  two  men  on  the  same  couch  drinking 
to  the  accompaniment  of  the  two  familiar  musicians.  Beneath 
the  couch  we  can  make  out  dimly  a  servant,  and  a  hunting 
leopard,  probably  feeding  ;  both  have  their  names  attached  : 
that  of  the  animal  is  KanJkru.  In  Egyptian  reliefs  also,  dating 
from  the  Fifth  Dynasty,  we  occasionally  find  names  attached  to 
the  domestic  animals  depicted,  for  instance  ducks  and  pigeons. 

Of  the  two  men  reclining  on  the  couch  the  foremost  holds 
a  drinking-bowl  and  an  egg.  In  the  Ny  Carlsberg  facsimile 
he  is  represented  as  beardless,  but  no  doubt  wrongly.  It  is 
an  elderly  man  ;  his  face  is  one  of  the  earliest  examples  of 
naturalism  in  Etruscan  portraiture.  The  other,  full-bearded, 
holds  a  flat,  fluted  vessel  without  foot,  presumably  one  of  the 
celebrated  Etruscan  golden  vessels  which  are  more  minutely 
characterized  in  a  symposium  in  the  Tomba  della  Pulcella  ; 
they  were  even  introduced  into  Athens,  where,  side  by  side 
with  Corinthian  works  in  bronze,  they  formed  part  of  the 
decoration  of  a  wealthy  house,  and  they  are  eulogized  in  a 
poem  by  Critias,^  one  of  Athens'  finest  beaux  esprits. 

In  this  painting  in  the  Tomba  Golini  the  inscriptions 
give  us  much  valuable  information  as  to  the  connexion 
between  the  two  persons.^  Above  the  first  we  read  :  '  Vel 
lecates  arnthial  ruva  larthialisa  clan  velusum  nefs  marniu 
spurana  eprthnec  tenve  mechlum  rasneas  cleusinsl  zilachnve 
pulum  rumitrine  thi  ma[l]ce  del  lur.'  In  translation  the 
text  runs  :  '  Vel  Lecates,  Amth's  brother,^  son  of  Larth, 
and  descendant  of  Vel.  He  held  the  offices  of  Maro  urbanus 
{spur  means  town)  and  Eprthne  (secular  official  title)  and 
was  Zilach  (dictator)  of  the  Etruscan  people  in  Clusium  .  .  . ' 

^  Athenaeus  i.  28  b.  part   incorrectly   copied   in   the   Ny 

^  Corpus     imcr.     Eirusc.    5093-4.  Carlsberg  facsimiles. 

I   am   indebted   to   my   friend,   Dr.  ^  That  ruva  means  brother  seems  to 

S.  P.  Cortsen,  for  help  in  the  interpre-  be  unanimously  accepted,  though  it 

tation  of  this  and  other  Etruscan  in-  only  appears  in  the  two  inscriptions  of 

scriptions.    These  are  for  the  greater  this  tomb. 


Fig.  3t.     SYMPOSIUM    IN    THE    TOMBA  GOLINI  AT  ORVIETO 


Fig.  32,.     WALL-PAINTING    IN    THE    TOMBA    GOLINI 


38 


TOMBAGOLINI  39 

The  rest  is  unintelligible.  It  is  interesting  in  the  inscription 
to  come  across  the  name  by  which  the  Etruscans  called 
themselves,  rasneas ;  Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus  (i.  30) 
was  therefore  justified  in  saying  that  the  Etruscans  called 
themselves  Rasenas.  The  name  Larth  is  common  in  Etruscan 
inscriptions.  The  Romans  knew  it  and  called  the  well-known 
Etruscan  king  by  his  full  name,  Lars  Porsenna  (in  Etruscan, 
Larth  Pursna).^ 

We  now  turn  to  the  inscription  above  the  bearded  man 
on  the  same  couch  ;  his  name  is  Arnth  Leinies,  son  of  Larth, 
and  descendant  of  Vel  ;  his  official  titles  follow,  and  the 
inscription  ends  :  '  ru[va]  l[ecates  velus]  amce,'  i.  e.,  was 
brother  of  Vel  Lecates.  Thus  we  have  two  brothers  reclining 
on  the  same  couch,  and  the  inscription  makes  it  probable 
that  the  other  symposiasts,  too,  are  not  chance  revellers,  but 
members  of  the  same  family,  united  in  the  picture  as  they 
were  in  life  and  in  the  grave. 

In  the  same  tomb,  to  the  left  of  this  scene,  we  see 
a  table,  bearing  several  metal  vessels,  a  thymiaterion,  and 
an  ivory  box  for  incense,  and  flanked  by  two  candelabra 
with  lighted  candles  stuck  into  birds'  beaks  (fig.  32).  The 
Etruscans  were  considered  inventors  of  the  art  of  candle- 
making  and  taught  the  Romans  to  manufacture  different 
kinds  of  candles,  from  big  wax  candles — candelae  and  cerei — 
to  cheap  dips — sebaceae.  The  Italic  peoples  used  candles 
and  candlesticks  until  Roman  Imperial  times,  though  in  the 
last  centuries  they  also  had  oil  lamps,  the  manufacture  and 
use  of  which  they  had  learned  from  the  Greeks  ;  the  oldest 
clay  lamps  found  in  the  northern  part  of  Italy  date  from 
about  300  B.C. 2  To  the  left  of  the  table  is  seen  a  naked 
slave  with  a  jug  and  a  dish ;  to  the  right  a  young  man  in 
a  light-coloured,  sleeved  chiton,  who  has  been  conjectured 

1  The  name  Pursna  or  Pursena  has,  i ;  Pauli,  Altital.  Studien,  iv.  64  fit. 

however,  never  been  found  in  any  ^  With  reference  to  the  use  of  tapers 

Etruscan  inscription.    The  Etruscan  at  the  bier  in  antiquity  see  Rushforth, 

Lar  or  Larth  has  nothing  to  do  with  Journal  of  Roman  Studies,  v.  1915, 

the  Roman  Las  or  Lar.    Cp.  Schuize,  p.  149  ff. 
Zur  Geschichte  latein.  Eigennamen,  85. 


40  TOMBA  GOLINI 

to  be  another  servant.  But  again  the  inscription  affords 
positive  information  :  '  Vel  leinies  larthial  niva  amthialum 
clan  velusum  pnimaths  avils  semphs  lupuce  * ;  i.e.*  Vel 
Leinies,  Larth's  brother,  son  of  Amth  and  descendant  of 
Vel ;  he  died  {lupuce)  at  the  age  of  7.'  ^  So  the  boy  is  son 
of  the  hindmost  man  on  the  banqueting-couch  and  belongs 
to  the  noble  family  interred  in  the  tomb. 


XII 

Corresponding  to  the  lassoing  of  the  horse  in  the  Tomba 
del  Morente,  as  a  preparation  for  the  chariot  race,  we  find 
in  the  Tomba  Golini  pictures  of  the  preparations  for  the 
banquet  which  is  celebrated  in  the  pictures  mentioned  above. 
In  one  of  the  pictures  we  see  cattle,  venison,  and  poultry 
hanging  in  the  larder,  in  another  the  cooking  in  the  kitchen 
itself  (fig.  33) ;  like  everything  else  in  Etruria,  it  is  accompanied 
by  the  flute.  To  the  left  of  the  flute-player  a  woman  is 
struggling  with  a  sideboard  piled  with  food ;  to  the  right 
a  naked  slave  with  a  loincloth  is  working  at  a  small  table, 
using  two  small  implements  rather  like  plummets.  Various 
interpretations  have  been  advanced  :  that  he  is  kneading 
dough,  or  grinding  colours  ;  the  latter  explanation,  how- 
ever, is  improbable  in  a  kitchen  scene.  Besides  these 
Dennis  proposes  a  third  possibiUty — that  he  is  chopping 
vegetables,  but  he  dares  not  commit  himself  to  a  decision. 
The  table  itself,  at  which  the  slave  is  standing,  seems  to 
have  a  raised  edge,  and  thereby  recalls  the  elder  Cato's 
recipe  for  the  preparation  of  cheese  cakes  and  puff^s  ^  : 
'  Tzkt  a  clean  table,  a  foot  broad,  surround  it  with  an  edge 
(balieus),  and  then  mix  honey  and  cheese  on  it.'  For  puffs, 
directions  are  given  to  belabour  the  dough  with  two  sticks 
or  staves  (rudes).    After  all  the  procedure  here  is  somewhat 

^  Cp.  Vilh.  Thomsen,  Remarques  sur     1899,  no,  4,  p.  391. 
la  parente  de  la  larigiie  dtrusqiie,  Bulk-        ^  De  agricultura  76  and  86. 
tin  de  FAcadimie  royale  de  Danemark, 


Fig.  3  3 
KITCHEN    INTERIOR    IN   THE   TOMBA    GOLINI 


Fig.  34.     PAINTING    IN   THE   TOMBA   DEL   LETTO    FUNEBRE 
After  a  coloured  drawing  in  the  Helbig  Museum 


KITCHEN  SCENES  41 

similar,  only  that  the  dough  is  kneaded  with  pieces  of  metal 
and  not  with  staves. 

In  these  scenes  from  kitchen  and  wine-cellar,  where  the 
wood  is  being  chopped,^  where  the  cooks  are  swinging  the 
saucepans  or  working  at  the  range  ,^  where  young  slaves  are 
struggling  with  sideboards  covered  with  drinking- vessels,  the 
inscriptions  contain  the  names  of  the  slaves.  Men  desired 
to  be  served  in  the  after-life  by  the  same  skilful  slaves  as 
in  the  present,  and  it  was  therefore  the  custom  in  later 
times  to  add  the  names.  This  reminds  one  of  the  Egyptian 
tomb-reliefs,  where  sometimes  the  serfs  and  the  slave  girls 
are  designated  only  by  the  name  and  mark  of  the  estate, 
so  that  in  a  way  each  of  them  represents  one  of  the  estates 
of  the  deceased  lord,  whereas  in  other  cases  they  have  their 
proper  names  attached  and  survive  as  personalities  in  the 
after-life. 


XIII 

Thus  we  see  a  slow  transformation  taking  place  in  the 
ideas  which  inspired  the  Etruscan  tomb-paintings.  In  the 
Tomba  del  Morto  and  the  Tomba  degli  Auguri,  the  repre- 
sentation of  the  death  lament  showed  plainly  that  the  main 
theme  was  the  festival  in  honour  of  the  dead  ;  and  the 
memorial  feast  itself  should  probably  in  most  cases  be  recog- 
nized in  the  banquet  accompanied  by  the  symposium  or — 
as  in  the  Tomba  delle  Iscrizioni — the  preparations  for  it. 
This  conception  is  also  clearly  expressed  in  the  sepulchral 
paintings  of  the  fifth  century  B.C.,  such  as  the  Tomba  del 
Letto  funebre,  where  the  main  picture  (fig.  34)  represents 
an  enormous  couch  with  a  footstool  in  front  ^ ;   on  the  tall 

^  Cp.  Plautus,  Pseudolus  158   'te  inter  tot  ignes  coquos.* 

cum  securi  caudicali  praeficio  pro-  ^  Footstools    were    also    used     in 

vinciae.'  Rome  for  mounting  the  high  couches. 

*  Cp.  Seneca,  Epist.  114.  26  'ad-  Yziro,  De  lingua  Latina  v.  168. 
spice  culinas  nostras  et  concursantis 

2468  G 


42      TOMBADELLETTOFUNEBRE 

pile  of  bolsters  and  coverlets  rest  two  pairs  of  cushions,  each 
of  them  supporting  a  green  chaplet  encircling  a  pointed  cap 
(tutulus).  Green  festoons  and  a  long  red  cord  hang  on  the 
walls  :  to  the  right  of  the  couch  are  two  symposiasts  and  two 
slaves  ;  the  slaves  face  the  big  central  couch,  and  hold  one 
an  egg,  the  other  a  loaf  in  their  raised  hands.  To  the  left 
of  the  picture  are  the  flute-player  and  the  sideboard  with 
vases.  Here  we  get  an  idea  how  a  lectisternium  was  spread 
in  honour  of  the  dead,  in  connexion  with  the  symposium  at 
a  memorial  feast.  The  dead  are  represented  by  their  head- 
gear ;  to  that  the  slaves  to  the  right  are  offering  sacrifice, 
to  that  the  flute-player  to  the  left  sounds  his  notes.  How 
deeply,  in  this  direction  also,  tradition  influenced  the 
Romans,  and  how  long  the  practice  lingered,  is  seen  from 
the  description  which  the  satirist  Persius  gives  (iii.  103)  of 
a  noble  Roman  lying  in  state  : 

Hinc  tuba,  candelae,  tandemque  beatulus  alto 
compositus  lecto  crassisque  lutatus  amomis 
in  portam  rigidas  calces  extendit :  at  ilium 
hesterni  capita  induto  subiere  Quirites. 

And  then  the  horns,  the  candles  !  and  the  dead, 
Smeared  with  thick  balms,  lies  stiff  on  lofty  bed, 
Heels  pointing  doorwards,  till  he 's  borne  away 
By  new-capped  citizens  ^  of  yesterday. 

But  the  pictures  in  the  Tomba  Golini  seem  to  indicate 
that  the  symposium  is  not  only  a  ceremony  on  the  funeral 
day  or  at  memorial  feasts,  but  that  the  purpose  is,  by  means 
of  the  painting  as  well  as  by  the  undoubtedly  splendid 
accessories  of  the  tombs,  which  were  rifled  and  removed 
long  ago,  to  secure  to  the  dead  or  the  whole  of  the  family, 
who  in  course  of  time  were  interred  in  the  tomb,  a  happy 
and  festive  existence  hereafter  ;  the  same  idea  as  in  the 
Egyptian  tomb-reliefs,  the  object  of  which  was  to  safeguard 
the  deceased  against '  the  second  death ',  that  is,  annihilation. 
And  just  as  the  Egyptian  tomb-reliefs  extend  to  all  aspects 

^  i.  e.  slaves  made  free  by  his  will,  and  entitled  to  wear  the  cap  of  liberty. 


ETRUSCAN  IMPERIALISM  43 

of  life  in  order  that  the  dead  may  enjoy  without  restriction 
the  sight  of  everything  which  made  his  Hfe  rich  and  festive, 
from  the  industry  of  the  slaves  and  artisans  occupied  in 
his  service  to  his  own  boating  and  hunting  expeditions  in 
the  papyrus  thickets  of  the  Nile,  so  the  Etruscan  sepulchral 
paintings  have  a  further  object  and  treat  subjects  which  are 
only  intelligible  if  the  end  in  view  is  to  procure  for  the  dead 
a  full  enjoyment  of  the  delights  of  life,  and  which  cannot 
in  any  way  be  associated  with  funeral  or  funeral  feast.  This 
applies  especially  to  the  hunting  pictures  of  the  sixth  and 
fifth  centuries  B.C.,  found  respectively  in  the  Tomba  della 
Caccia  e  della  Pesca  and  in  the  Tomba  Querciola. 


XIV 

In  the  older  group  of  tombs  of  the  latter  part  of  the 
sixth  and  the  earlier  part  of  the  fifth  centuries  B.C.  we  find 
a  bright  and  cheerful  delight  in  the  material  pleasures  of 
life,  and  a  clear  confidence  in  the  belief  that  the  race,  whose 
means  are  sufficient  to  provide  and  adorn  a  sumptuous 
sepulchral  chamber,  will  also  be  permitted  to  enjoy  all  this — 
from  wine  and  women  to  hunting  and  sanguinary  games — 
in  the  hereafter.  Thus  it  is  not  for  nothing  that  these  tombs 
synchronize  with  the  time  of  Etruscan  imperialism.  Previous 
to  this,  the  maritime  power  of  Etruria  had  made  it  dreaded 
and  hated  by  the  Greeks,  whose  ships  were  exposed  to 
seizure  and  piracy  as  often  as  they  ventured  across  the  '  Tyr- 
rhenian Sea',  so  that  the  Greeks  had  only  one  colony  on 
the  north  coast  of  Sicily,  and  had  great  trouble  in  keeping 
up  communications  with  the  Campanian  Kyme  and  with 
Massilia.^  *  The  savage  Etruscan  '  already  appears  in  post- 
Homeric  poetry,  where  Circe  bears  Odysseus  two  children, 
Latinus  and  Agrius  (the  savage),  who  represent  the  two 

1  Strabo  vi.  p.  410  (  =  Ephorus,  mologist  Philochorus  even  derived 
fragm.  2  in  Miiller,  Fragmenta  historic,  the  word '  tyrant '  from  Tyrrhenians 
graec.  i.  p.  246).    The  ingenious  ety-    (Philoch.  fragm.  5  in  Miiller,  op.  cit.). 


44  THE  POWER  OF  ETRURIA 

principal  races  of  Italy,  the  Latins  and  the  Etruscans.  At 
length,  in  474  B.C.,  the  Kymeans,  in  alliance  with  Hieron, 
the  ruler  of  Syracuse,  succeeded  in  gaining  a  sea  victory 
over  the  Etruscan  fleet,  which  Pindar  has  celebrated  in  the 
first  Pythian  Ode  (i.  72  ff.),  and  after  which  Hieron  sent  to 
Olympia  a  bronze  helmet  with  an  inscription  recording  the 
victory,  now  in  the  British  Museum.  This  defeat  was  the 
first  warning  that  the  Etruscans  had  reached  the  zenith  of 
their  power,  but  as  late  as  the  latter  part  of  the  fourth  century 
their  piracy  was  still  dangerous  and  troublesome  to  Greek 
shipping,  as  is  seen  from  a  passage  of  Aristotle  and  an  inscrip- 
tion of  325-324  B.c.^  As  a  bulwark  of  their  maritime  power, 
as  early  as  the  sixth  century  they  had  conquered  Corsica, 
and  on  land  they  ruled  from  the  plain  of  the  Po,  which  they 
likewise  conquered  in  the  sixth  century,  to  the  southernmost 
part  of  Campania,  where  they  made  Capua  itself  submit  to 
their  power  .^  Cato  was  justified  in  saying  that  almost  the 
whole  of  Italy  in  the  days  of  old  had  been  '  in  the  power  of 
the  Tuscans  ',*  and  when  Sophocles  *  would  enumerate  the 
districts  of  Italy  he  mentions  only  three  :  Oinotria  (South 
Italy),  the  Tyrrhenian,  and  the  Ligurian  land.  When  the 
Athenians  during  the  Peloponnesian  War  undertook  the 
desperate  campaign  against  Syracuse,  they  allied  themselves 
in  415  with  the  Etruscans,  whose  auxiliaries  were  amongst 
the  bravest  in  the  Athenian  offensive  force. ^  In  the  period 
of  the  wall-paintings  in  question,  Rome  herself  was  also 
made  subject  to  them  and  had  to  pay  contributions  to  the 
powerful  Etruscan  confederation,  after  the  king  of  Clusium, 
Porsenna,  had  seized  the  city  in  508  B.C.  As  is  well  known, 
attempts  were  made  by  later  historians  to  gloss  over  this 
capture  of  the  town,  and  the  honorary  decrees  of  the  senate 
to  Porsenna  are  described  as  voluntary,  but  tell  quite  plainly 
their  own  tale  of  subjection.^    Against  the  background  of 

^  Dittenberger,    Sylloge   imcriptio-  *  Dionys.  Halic.  i.  12. 

num  Graecarum,^  305,  with  note  i.  ^  Thucydides  vi.  88,  and  vii.  54-5. 

2  Polybius  ii.  17.    Livy  v.  33.  7-8.  ®  Dionys.  Halic.  v.  26,  35,  39. 
8  Origines  62. 


ETRUSCAN  INFLUENCE  IN  ROME  45 

this  event  the  contemporary  Tomba  della  Scimmia  at  Chiusi 
acquires  a  new  interest ;  it  was  constructed  for  one  of  those 
families  which  took  part  in  the  victory  over  Rome.  But 
previous  to  this,  the  names  of  the  Roman  kings  :  Lucius 
Tarquinius  and  Tarquinius  Superbus — ^Tarquinius  is  the 
Etruscan  Tarchna  ^ — bear  witness  to  the  dependence  of 
Rome,  which  is  also  evident  from  the  permanent  Etruscan 
occupation  of  the  Janiculum.  It  is  quite  possible  that  the 
expulsion  of  Tarquinius  Superbus  does  not  mark  the  fall  of 
the  national  monarchy,  but  was  simply  an  attempt  to  throw 
off  the  foreign  yoke,  an  attempt  which  led  to  Porsenna's 
occupation  of  the  city  two  years  later  and  thus  did  not  bring 
about  the  emancipation  of  the  Romans.^  It  is  in  this  period 
of  dependence  that  the  Etruscans  left  their  mark  on  the  laws 
and  customs  of  Rome,  that  the  three  oldest  Roman  tribes, 
Ramnes,  Titles,  and  Luceres,  got  their  names,  which,  as 
stated  by  Varro,'  on  the  evidence  of  an  Etruscan  tragedian 
Volnius,  are  Etruscan,  a  view  shared  by  the  modern  philo- 
logist Wilhelm  Schulze.*  The  insignia  also  of  the  Roman 
officials,  such  as  the  curule  chair  and  the  toga  praetexta,* 
and  the  twelve  consular  lictors  with  the  fasces,^  are  rightly 
traced  back  to  Etruria.  For  the  Etruscan  confederation 
consisted  of  twelve  towns,  and  each  of  these  chose  a  king 
who  appeared  at  the  gatherings  followed  by  a  lictor,  and 
only  when  they  chose  a  common  overlord  and  war-leader 
could  he  appear  with  twelve  lictors.  It  is  therefore  rather 
improbable  that  the  Roman  kings  appeared  with  twelve 
lictors  in  their  train  ;  more  probably  this  large  retinue  only 
became  the  privilege  of  the  consuls  after  the  suppression  of 
Etruria.  But  it  was  upon  the  nobility  of  Rome  that  those 
years  of  Etruscan  predominance  left  their  deepest  impress, 
and  it  has  thus  been  possible  for  Wilhelm  Schulze,  through 
his  investigations  of  Etruscan  and  Latin  proper  names,  to 

^  Schulze,    Zur    Geschichte    latein.  Livy  i.  13.  8. 

Eigennamen,  p.  95  f.,  262  fF.  *  Cp.    E.    Kornemann,    Klio   xiv. 

2  Dionys.  Halic.  iii.  45,  47  fF.  1914-15,  p.  190.            ^  Livy  i.  8.  3. 

^  Varro,   De    lingua  Latina  v.   5  ;  *  Dionys.  Halic.  iii.  6i-2. 


46    ETRUSCAN  NOBILITY  AND  CLIENTS 

throw  a  remarkable  light  on  the  earliest  history  of  Rome 
and  to  prove  that  a  great  number  of  the  oldest  patrician 
families  of  Rome  were  descendants  of  the  Etruscan  ruling 
race,  and  that  intermarriage  with  Etruscans,  and  Etruscan 
influence  on  Rome,  persisted  down  to  the  end  of  the  Roman 
republic.^  It  is  also  beyond  doubt  that  the  peculiar  Roman 
system  of  patron  and  client,  by  which  clients  attached  them- 
selves to  a  nobleman  as  followers  {cluentes),  added  his  name 
to  their  own,  and  paid  him  dues  in  peace  time,  though  they 
were  originally  immune  from  military  service,''  was  of 
Etruscan  origin,  nay,  was  the  essential  feature  in  the  structure 
of  the  Etruscan  community.  In  course  of  time  the  Roman 
clients  became  liable  to  military  service,  obtaining  at  the 
same  time  civic  rights,  and  it  is  presumably  this  fact  which 
accounts  for  Rome's  final  victory  over  the  Etruscans,  whose 
proud  Lucumones  reserved  to  themselves  both  civic  privileges 
and  military  skill,  and  were  therefore  doomed  to  extinction 
when  luxury  and  effeminacy  had  sapped  their  strength. 

But  at  the  period  of  the  tombs  in  question  the  blood  of 
the  nobility  is  still  healthy  and  is  in  no  need  of  regeneration. 
This  is  the  nobility  whose  long  lances  controlled  Italy,  and 
whose  cavalry  was  so  terrible  in  onset.^  The  pictures  of  the 
tombs  show  them  at  the  death  lament,  at  feasts,  and  on 
hunting  expeditions,  at  symposia,  where  men  and  women 
freely  indulge  in  wine  and  love,  and  finally  in  the  Tomba 
delle  Bighe  as  spectators  seated  on  the  stands.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  horsemen,  the  dancers,  the  dancing- women,  and 
the  athletes  are  certainly  of  lower  extraction,  hired  servants 
like  the  corresponding  performers  in  Rome,  perhaps,  to  some 
extent,  clients. 

1  Wilhelm  Schulze,  Zur  Geschichte  ^  Dionys.  Halic.  ii.  8,  lo. 

lateinischer  Eigennamen.    Abh.  der  kgl.  ^  Livy  iv.   i8.   8.     Cp.  ix.  29.  2, 

Gesellsch.  der  Wissensch.  zu  Gottingen,  where  the  Etruscans  are  described  as 

Phil.-hist.  Kl.,  Neue   Folge,   Bd.   5,  the  most  dangerous  enemies  of  the 

No.  5,  p.  62  ff.  Romans. 


DECLINE  AND   FALL  OF  ETRURI A     47 


XV 

But  domestic  and  foreign  enemies  destroyed  this  race 
of  rulers.  At  the  beginning  of  the  fourth  century  they 
were  attacked  simultaneously  by  the  Gauls  from  the  north, 
by  the  Samnites  ^  from  the  south-east,  and  by  the  Romans 
from  the  south.  The  Gauls  inundated  for  some  time  the 
whole  of  Etruria  and  presently  captured  Rome  as  well,  but 
were  driven  back  again  to  North  Italy.  The  Samnites  seized 
Capua  ;  but  a  far  heavier  blow  was  the  loss  of  the  great  city 
of  Veii,  the  southernmost  city  of  Etruria  proper,  which  was 
captured  by  the  Romans  in  396  B.c.^  In  spite  of  the  alliance 
with  Carthage,  the  maritime  power  of  the  Etruscans  also 
declined  in  the  course  of  the  fourth  century,  but  it  was  not 
until  the  third  century  that  they  received  the  death-blow 
at  the  hands  of  the  Romans  and  Latins.  That  they  were 
still  dangerous  antagonists  at  the  beginning  of  the  third 
century  may  be  seen  from  Livy's  account,  but  at  the  end 
of  the  century,  during  the  second  Punic  war,  their  rebellious 
spirit  was  easily  quelled,  and  even  Hannibal  could  not  tempt 
them  to  unite  in  revolt.^  At  that  time  the  country  was  still 
rich,  as  is  plainly  shown  by  the  requisitions  for  Scipio's 
army.^  It  was  not  until  the  following  century  that  Etruria 
sank  into  deep  poverty  ;  in  the  time  of  the  Gracchi  the 
country  was  almost  a  waste.*  Plautus  describes  the  Etruscan 
people  as  very  immoral ;  in  the  Cistellaria  (562)  the  poet 
speaks  of  those  who  procure  their  dowry  ignobly,  like  the 
Tuscans,  by  selling  their  bodies,  and  in  the  Curculio  (482) 
the  Etruscan  quarter  of  Rome  is  referred  to  as  '  inhabited 
by  persons  who  sell  themselves  '.  Then  followed  in  the  first 
century  B.C.  the  military  colonies  of  Sulla,®  which  gradually 
Romanized  the  country.  Inscriptions,  especially  from  the 
borderland  of  Umbria,  which  had  been  partly  Etruscan,  bear 

^  Livy  iv.  37.  1-2.  ^  Plutarch,  Tiberius  Gracchus  8. 

'^  Livy  V.  22.  8.  ^  As    a    punishment    because    the 

3  Livy  xxvii.  21.  6  ;  38.6.  country    had    joined    the    party    of 

*  Livy  xxviii.  45.  14-18.  Marius.    Plutarch,  Marius  41. 


48     DECLINE  AND   FALL  OF  ETRURIA 

ample  witness  to  the  way  in  which  the  language  changed 
even  within  the  old  Etruscan  families.  About  the  middle 
of  the  first  century  parts  of  the  country  were  ravaged  by 
P.  Clodius  Pulcher  and  his  bands  of  soldiers.^  Then  comes 
the  foundation  of  new  military  colonies  by  Caesar  and, 
finally,  the  complete  Romanization  of  the  country  under 
Augustus.  Propertius  ^  describes,  not  without  pathos,  the 
extermination  of  the  last  Etruscan  strongholds  during  the 
Perusian  war  in  the  year  40  B.C. :  *  eversosque  focos  antiquae 
gentis  Etruscae '. 

The  knowledge  of  the  Etruscan  language  was  preserved 
all  through  antiquity  by  the  Etruscan  soothsayers.  The 
emperor  Claudius  was  versed  in  Etruscan,  and  delivered 
a  long  address  in  the  Senate  about  the  preservation  of  the 
old  Etruscan  ritual  against  the  invasion  of  new,  oriental 
elements.  The  other  emperors  had,  as  a  rule,  an  Etruscan 
soothsayer  in  their  suite,  whom  they  consulted  before  taking 
any  important  step,  and  this  custom  survived  down  to  the 
introduction  of  Christianity.  Julian  the  Apostate  was  accom- 
panied by  hosts  of  Etruscan  soothsayers,  who,  however, 
undoubtedly  read  the  sacred  books  in  the  Latin  transla- 
tion by  Tarquitius  Priscus,^  and,  as  late  as  408,  we  learn 
that  Tuscan  soothsayers  and  scribes  still  existed.  If  any 
of  them  at  that  time  could  still  read  the  language,  then 
Etruscan,  as  a  dead  and  sacred  language,  had  survived  the 
disappearance  of  the  people  by  about  half  a  millennium.* 

^  Cicero,  Pro  Milone  26,  74,  87.  ^  Thulin,  Pauly-Wissowa,  vii.  2434. 

^  ii.  1 .  29.    The  later  authors  speak  *  The  best  summary  view  of  the 

of  nothing  but  the  corpulency  and  Etruscan  civilization  is  still  to  be  found 

imbecility  of  the  Etruscans.    Catullus,  in  Ottfried  Miiller,  Die  Etrusker,  in 

Carm.  39.  21.    Virgil,  Georg.  ii.  193  ;  the  second  edition  by  Deecke. 
Aen.  xi.  732.    Diodorus  v.  40. 


Fig.  35.   DEMON  IN  THE  TOMBA  DELL'  ORCO 


49 


TOMBA  DELL'  ORCO  49 


XVI 

To  this  long,  sad  period  of  national  decline  the  later 
group  of  Etruscan  tomb-paintings  and  reliefs  on  cinerary 
urns  form  a  remarkable  and  melancholy  accompaniment. 

The  continuity  is  unbroken ;  the  new  creeps  in,  at  first, 
without  superseding  the  old  subjects.  This  is  especially 
clear  in  the  front  room  of  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo,  which 
dates  from  the  latter  part  of  the  fifth  century,  and  from  which 
we  reproduced  the  beautiful  married  couple  at  the  symposium 
(figs.  28,  29) ;  in  the  same  sepulchral  chamber  we  see  in  a 
corner,  beneath  a  finely  stylized  vine,  a  terrible  death  demon, 
with  large  wings  and  a  shock  of  wildly  fluttering  reddish  hair, 
which  is  sharply  outlined  on  a  blue  background  as  if  it  were 
surrounded  by  a  halo.  His  beard  is  pointed,  his  nose  termi- 
nates in  an  eagle's  beak  ;  over  his  shoulder  a  snake  rears 
itself,  and  the  latchets  of  his  shoes  are  snakes.  His  dress 
consists  of  a  sleeved  chiton  with  belt  and  shoulder-straps, 
and  in  his  hand  he  carries  a  torch  or  a  hammer.  The  eyes 
roll  horribly  in  the  bluish  face  ;  the  colour  of  the  skin 
recalls  the  blue-bottle  fly  (fig.  35). 

This  death  demon  is  painted  isolated,  unconnected  with 
the  subjects  of  the  rest  of  the  paintings,  and  could  indeed 
be  explained  away  as  a  decorative  figure,  created,  to  be 
sure,  by  an  imagination  inflamed  with  terror.  But  in  the 
third  room  of  the  same  tomb,  the  pictures  of  which  belong 
to  the  transition  from  the  fifth  to  the  fourth  century,  a  similar 
demon  of  the  nether  world  is  already  represented  in  action 
(fig.  36).  The  inscription  gives  his  name,  Tuchulcha  ;  he 
has  asses'  ears,  two  snakes  rear  themselves  like  horns  above 
his  brow,  and  with  a  huge  snake  he  threatens  a  long-haired 
youth  who  sits  sorrowful  on  the  rock,  with  a  himation  round 
his  loins  ;  his  name,  according  to  the  inscription,  is  '  These  '. 
He  is  the  Greek  Theseus,  and  the  young  man  opposite 
to  him  is  Pirithous  ;   the  motive  is  their  sufferings  in  the 

2468  H 


50  UNDERWORLD   SCENES 

Underworld,  where  they  had  ventured  down  in  order  to  ab- 
duct Persephone.  But  there  broods  over  the  scene  a  sinister 
spirit  which  is  not  Greek.  Thus  we  see  behind  the  rock 
on  which  Theseus  is  seated  a  loathsome  snake  with  winged 
head,  and  the  remains  of  a  blue  demon  with  staff  and  chiton, 
a  kinsman  of  Tuchulcha.  The  appearance,  to  the  left  of 
this  weird  phantasmagoria,  of  the  peaceful  sideboard  with 
its  fine  metal  bowls  ^  and  with  a  handsome  naked  slave  as 
cup-bearer  in  front  of  it,  has  undeniably  a  somewhat  odd 
effect.  This  is  a  reminiscence  of  the  old  joyous  symposium 
scenes,  and  a  remarkable  witness  to  the  lack  of  clearness  in 
the  Etruscan  mind  and  to  the  fragmentary  character  of 
Etruscan  pictorial  art.  A  similar  mixture  of  everyday  life 
and  myth  would  be  inconceivable  in  Egyptian  or  in  Greek  art. 

Similarly,  in  the  Tomba  Golini,  we  see  the  side-table 
and  the  slave  in  immediate  continuation  of  the  picture 
representing  the  two  enthroned  rulers  of  the  Underworld — 
Hades  and  Persephone  (inscriptions  :  Eita  and  Phersipnai). 
Hades  has  a  wolf-helmet  and  a  snake-sceptre  and  is  caressing 
Persephone,  who  has  a  bird-crowned  sceptre  in  her  left  hand, 
and  rests  her  right  hand  on  the  knee  of  Hades  (see  above 
fig.  32).  Her  dress,  her  face,  and  her  yellow  hair  under  the 
golden  diadem  are  all  splendidly  painted. 

In  later  Etruscan  paintings  we  come  upon  two  new 
groups  of  motives — fantastic  pictures  of  the  Underworld,  and 
scenes  from  Greek  mythology.  Sometimes  they  mingle  as 
in  the  Theseus  and  Pirithous  scene  and  in  the  pictures  of 
Hades  and  Persephone.  Hades  and  Persephone  recur  in 
a  painting  in  the  third  chamber  of  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo 
(inscription :  Aita  and  Phersipnei),  where  weird  mists  roll 
about  them,  and  a  figure  with  three  heads,  Gerun,  is  stand- 
ing before  their  throne  (fig.  37).  It  is  the  Geryon  of  the 
Greeks,  but  he  is  not  the  cowherd  on  the  far-distant  island 
Erythra,  but  a  warrior  in  complete  armour  who  seems  to  be 
receiving  the  commands  of  Hades.    Evidently  the  Etruscans 

^  Cp.  for  the  well-appointed  table    {Menaechmi    102)  :     '  tantas   struices 
Plautus's  description  of  a  liberal  host    concinnat  patinarias.' 


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TOMBA  DELL'  ORCO  51 

have  made  him  the  servant  and  champion  of  Hades.  Per- 
sephone has  snakes  in  her  hair  and  a  curious  collar  which 
we  meet  again  on  the  chitons  of  women  in  white  Attic 
lek3^hoi  of  the  fifth  century  b.  c.^  Hades  wears  the  traditional 
wolf-helmet.  It  is  remarkable  that  a  head  exactly  similar 
to  that  of  Hades  is  found  among  Michelangelo's  sketches 
(fig.  38),  which  seems  to  indicate  that  Michelangelo  some- 
where in  Tuscany  saw  and  sketched  an  old  Etruscan  tomb. 
To  be  sure,  the  snout  of  the  animal  reminds  one  of  a  pig's, 
but  the  long  ears  and  the  fur  are  those  of  the  wolf. 

In  the  other  paintings  of  the  Tomba  dell'  Oreo  we  meet 
furthermore  with  Agamemnon  in  the  underworld,  and  in 
front  of  him  Tiresias  (Hinthial  Teriasals 
it  reads,  i.e.  the  shade  of  Tiresias).  But 
in  the  second  chamber  of  this  tomb,  dating 
from  the  fourth  century  B.C.,  there  is  also 
a  scene  from  Greek  mythology  which  has 
nothing  to  do  with  death  and  the  under- 
world ;  Odysseus  blinding  the  Cyclops 
Polyphemus  (inscriptions  :  Uthuste  and 
Cuclu).  We  can  here  speak  of  a  renais- 
sance, in  so  far  as  a  scene  from  a  Greek 
myth  formed  the  subject  of  the  big  picture 
of  the  beginning  of  the  sixth  century  in  the  Tomba  dei  Tori 
(cp .  fig .  2) .  But  the  aim  of  the  later  school  of  Etruscan  painters 
is  not  so  much  to  adorn  the  tomb  with  a  beautiful  decorative 
panel  after  some  Greek  prototype  ;  on  the  contrary,  they  turn 
to  the  Greek  myths  for  the  sake  of  their  subjects  and  pick  out 
motives  which  also  give  expression  to  the  curious  strain 
of  cruelty  inherent  in  the  Etruscan  mind. 

This  is  seen  most  clearly  in  the  famous  picture  from  the 
Fran9ois  tomb  at  Vulci,  discovered  in  1857  by  the  Italian 
painter  Alessandro  Fran9ois.  The  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek 
possesses  a  facsimile,  executed  by  the  painter  Mariani  after 
the  original  in  the  Palazzo  Torlonia,  whither  the  Prince 
Torlonia  had  it  removed  together  with  other  wall-paintings 

^  Walther  Riezler,  Weissgriindige  aitische  Lekythen,  pi.  70. 


52  TOMBAFRANgOIS 

from  the  same  tomb  :  but  the  copy  is  too  smooth  to  be 
trustworthy.  Unfortunately,  permission  to  obtain  another 
copy  from  the  inaccessible  Palazzo  is  certainly  not  to  be 
had.  The  picture  (fig.  39)  represents  the  sacrifice  of  Trojan 
captives  on  the  grave  of  Patroclus.  Achilles  (Etruscan 
Achle)  slaughters  with  his  own  hands  the  captured  Trojans 
(Etruscan  Truials)  ;  Ajax,  son  of  Oileus  (Aivas  Vilatas),  and 
Ajax,  son  of  Telamon  (Aivas  Tlamunus)  stand  by  ;  Aga- 
memnon (Achmemrun)  is  also  present,  and  the  shade  of 
Patroclus,  thirsting  for  the  blood  (Hinthial  Patrucles),  as 
well  as  two  truly  Etruscan  figures,  a  female  winged  genius 
of  death,  Vanth,  and  the  Etruscan  death-god,  Charun, 
coloured  like  the  blue-bottle  fly,  with  hammer  uplifted. 

This  subject  was  chosen  for  the  sake  of  the  slaughter.^ 
Sex  and  cruelty  are,  to  use  a  chemical  expression,  the  '  basic 
group  '  of  the  Etruscan  mind.  Thus  the  same  subject  is 
found  repeatedly  on  Etruscan  sarcophagi  and  vases,  and  in 
the  relief  on  a  cinerary  urn,  and  may  be  compared  with  the 
most  common  and  popular  representation  in  Etruscan  reliefs  : 
Eteocles  and  Polynices  killing  each  other.  Even  a  motive 
like  Ajax  falling  on  his  own  sword  constantly  recurs  in 
Etruscan  art,  as  well  as  the  barbarous  subject,  maschalismos 
(maiming  of  slain  enemies),  which  is  especially  common  on 
Etruscan  gems.^  A  characteristic  feature  of  the  picture  in 
the  Francois  tomb  is  the  deep  wounds  in  the  legs  of  the 
Trojan  captives  ;  they  are  meant  to  prevent  attempts  to 
escape  and  were  evidently  in  keeping  with  Etruscan  custom. 
For  stress  is  laid  on  the  cruelty  of  the  Etruscans  towards 
prisoners  of  war  by  Greek  as  well  as  by  Latin  authors  ; 
thus,  as  early  as  the  fifth  century,  the  inhabitants  of  Caere, 
after  a  sea  victory,  stoned  to  death  their  Phocaean  captives  ^ ; 
and  yet  Strabo  writes  of  the  Caeretans  that  they  were  highly 
respected  for  their  bravery  and  love  of  justice,  and  because, 

^  It  is  to  be  observed  that  the  Etrus-  iii.  1 14. 
cans  thrust  with  the  sword  ;  this  also         ^  Cp.  Beazley,  Lewes  House   Col- 

the  Romans  inherited  ;    whereas  the  lection  of  Gems,  p.  38,  74  f. 
Gauls  cut  and  the  Iberians  thrust  as         ^  Herodotus  i.  167. 
well  as  cut.    Polybius  ii.  33.  6,  and 


ETRUSCAN   CRUELTY  53 

powerful  as  they  were,  they  refrained  from  piracy.  The 
Romans  knew  better  when  they  personified  Etruscan  cruelty 
in  Mezentius,  King  of  Caere,  who  had  living  and  dead  tied 
together  to  rot  side  by  side  ;  nor  did  the  Romans  ever  forget 
that  the  inhabitants  of  Tarquinii  once  slaughtered  three 
hundred  and  seven  Roman  captives,^  and  they  took  bloody 
revenge  on  them.  The  Greeks  also  knew  of  the  massacring 
of  prisoners  of  war,  but  they  always  cherished  scruples  about 
it  and  felt  qualms,  as  when  Themistocles  was  compelled  to 
pay  a  tribute  of  slain  captives  to  '  Dionysius,  the  eater  of 
raw  flesh  '.^ 

Before  we  leave  the  Fran9ois  tomb  we  must  remind  the 
reader  of  the  existence  of  a  remarkable  series  of  pictures 
with  subjects  taken  from  the  conflicts  between  Etruria  and 
Rome  in  the  time  of  the  Roman  kings  .^ 


XVII 

The  demons  of  the  Underworld  who  figure  in  the 
Etruscan  paintings  are  almost  all  sinister.  The  devils 
brandishing  torches  and  snakes,  familiar  both  from  the 
paintings  and  from  the  reliefs  on  the  cinerary  urns,  remind 
one  of  Livy's  *  description  of  the  fight  of  the  Tarquinians 
and  the  Faliscans  against  the  Romans  in  354  B.C.,  when  a 
troop  of  Etruscan  priests,  armed  with  flaming  torches  and 
live  snakes,  threw  themselves  in  ecstatic  fury  on  the  Roman 
armies,  who  received  them  undauntedly  and  won  the  day. 
Charun,  also,  is  a  common  figure  on  the  Etruscan  sarcophagi 
and  cinerary  urns  of  the  fourth  and  following  centuries, 
suggesting  by  his  colour  the  demon  of  putrefaction,  Euryno- 
mus,  whom  Polygnotus  had  painted,  in  his  great  picture  of 
the  Underworld  in  the  Lesche  of  the  Cnidians  at  Delphi, 
seated  snarling  on  the  skin  of  a  carrion- vulture,  his  flesh  the 

^  Livy  vii.  15,  10  ;   19.  3.  xii.  1897,  p.  58  fF. 

^  Plutarch,  Themistocles  13.  *  Livy  vii.  17.  3-5,    Cp.  iv.  33.  2. 

^  K6Tte,jfahrbuck  des  archdol.  Instit. 


54  CHARUNANDTHELASAS 

colour  of  a  blue-bottle  fly.^  Chanin,  therefore,  is  not  identical 
with  the  old  ferryman,  Charon,  of  the  Greeks ;  he  is  the 
messenger  of  death,  the  terrible  f etcher  of  souls,  like  Charos 
in  the  popular  Greek  belief  of  our  own  day.  Only  the 
'  Charon  door '  of  the  Greek  theatre  indicates  the  existence 
of  similar  popular  ideas  among  the  ancient  Greeks. 

The  winged  Vanth  in  the  Fran9ois  tomb  seems  to  be 
one  of  the  benevolent  demons  of  the  underworld,  the  Lasas. 
Such  a  one  also  appears  in  a  door  panel  in  the  Tomba  Golini, 
already  frequently  cited  :  here  she  has  wings,  snakes  in 
her  girdle,  and  a  scroll  in  her  hand  (fig.  40).  She  is 
evidently  either  receiving  or  escorting  the  dead,  a  young  man 
in  a  mantle,  who  stands  in  a  biga  with  running  horses  ;  in 
the  inscription  above  him  the  word  Larth  can  easily  be  read, 
proving  that  he  is  not  a  professional  charioteer,  but  a  young 
man  of  high  standing.  His  arrival  in  the  underworld  is 
greeted  by  a  trumpeter,  painted  over  the  door.  We  may 
notice  here  that  the  '  Tyrrhenian  trumpet '  was  famous  far 
and  wide  and  was  even  introduced  into  Greece  ;  it  is  men- 
tioned several  times  in  Greek  tragedies.^  The  curved 
trumpet  here  seen  is  also  depicted  on  a  wall  in  the  Tomba 
degli  Scudi  at  Corneto  and,  like  the  curved  staff  of  the  augurs, 
was  adopted  by  the  Romans,  who  designated  both  of  them 
by  the  name  of  lituus  ;  Cicero  maintains  that  the  lituus- 
trumpet  was  the  earlier  of  the  two  and  gave  its  form  and  name 
to  the  lituus-staff,  the  badge  of  the  augurs.  The  introduction 
of  the  lituus-staff  was  attributed  to  Romulus,  and  his  sacred 
staff  was  said  to  have  been  rediscovered  by  a  miracle  in  the 
time  of  Camillus,' 

The  scroll  in  the  hand  of  the  female  demon,  referred  to 
above,  presumably  contained  an  account  of  the  good  actions 
of  the  dead,  to  be  used  when  he  presented  himself  before  the 
throne  of  Hades.  The  good  genius  herself  is  seen  at  work 
in  a  small  panel  of  the  Tomba  degli  Scudi,  where  she  is 

^  Pausanias  x.  28.  7-8.  ^  Cicero,  De  divinatione  i.  30.    Plu- 

^  Sophocles,  Ajax   17.     Aeschylus,    tarch,  Camillus  32. 
Eumenides  567.   Euripides,  Rhesus  988. 


Fig.  39.     WALL-PAINTING  FROIM   THE  TOMBA  FRANCOIS  AT  VULCI 


Fig.  40.     PAINTING  IN  THE  TOMBA  GOLINI  AT  ORVIETO 


Fig.  ^i.     PAINTING    FROM    THE    TOMBA    DELLA    PULCELLA 


CEREMONY  OF  THE  CERECLOTH    55 

scratching  an  inscription  on  a  tablet  (cp.  fig.  27),  while 
another  holds  a  torch  upside  down.  Both  these  figures  are 
repeated  in  the  reliefs  of  the  Etruscan  cinerary  urns  and  pass 
directly  into  the  plastic  art  of  Roman  sarcophagi  as  two 
allegorical  figures  :  Fama,  who  writes  the  merits  of  the 
dead  on  a  tablet,  and  the  genius  of  Death  with  torch  inverted. 
A  couple  of  flying  genii  appear  already  in  the  Tomba  della 
Pulcella,  which  belongs  to  the  first  half  of  the  fifth  century, 
in  the  pointed  pediment  above  the  recess  in  which  the  ashes 
of  the  dead  were  deposited.  They  carry  between  them  a 
cloth  which  they  seem  to  be  laying  down,  probably  the  cere- 
cloth for  the  dead  (fig.  41).^  Perhaps  this  also  explains  the 
mysterious  scene,  figured  on  two  tomb  altars  from  Chiusi, 
one  of  which  is  in  the  Barracco  Collection  (fig.  42),  the  other 
in  the  Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek  (Catalogue  No.  H.  76).  The 
motives  of  the  reliefs  on  these  limestone  altars  from  Chiusi 
and  on  the  cinerary  urns  from  the  same  town,  all  dating  from 
the  sixth  century,  are  taken  from  the  funeral,  like  the  sub- 
jects in  the  contemporary  tomb-paintings,  and  represent  the 
lament  of  men  and  women  over  the  dead  on  the  bier,  the 
burial  feast  and  the  preparations  for  it,  and  the  wild  dancing- 
scenes  at  the  funeral.  It  may  thus  be  that  the  scene  on  the 
relief  illustrated,  which  seems  to  give  a  picture  of  the  women's 
quarters,  represents  the  women  of  the  house  in  the  act  of 
scrutinizing  and  choosing  the  cerecloth  for  the  deceased  ; 
meanwhile,  the  house  was  probably  draped  with  cloth,  and 
the  dwellers  of  the  house  put  on  mourning.  Presumably 
the  mourning  colour  of  the  Etruscans  was  white,  like  that 
of  the  Romans  at  a  later  date ;  when  in  mourning,  the  women 
of  Rome,  to  the  wonder  of  Plutarch,  assumed  white  dresses 
and  white  headgear,  at  the  same  time  loosening  their  hair.^ 
The  hair  flowing  down  upon  the  shoulders  is  also  frequently 
seen  in  reliefs  on  cinerary  urns.  But  there  is  still  something 
mysterious  in  this  motive,  and  an  examination  of  the  mutilated 

^  An  Etruscan  gem  shows  the  dead     Beazley,  The  Lewes  Home  Collection  of 
Ajax    and   a  winged    genius   in  the     Ancient  Gems,  p.  34,  no.  37. 
act  of  placing  the  cerecloth  over  him.        ^  Plutarch,  Aetia  romana  26  and  14. 


56  ETRUSCAN  DEMONS 

ash  urn  in  the  Museum  of  Chiusi  (fig.  43)  does  not  make  it 
any  clearer.  This  urn  has  hitherto  been  explained  as  repre- 
senting a  marriage  scene.  But  as  the  opposite  side  of  the 
urn  represents  scenes  at  the  door  of  the  tomb,  it  is  more 
natural  to  interpret  this  relief  also  as  a  death  scene  ;  the 
flute-player  and  the  two  men  with  laurel  branches  we  know 
from  the  funeral  ceremonies  (cp.  p.  19),  and  the  curious  scene 
to  the  right,  where  two  men  draw  a  fringed  cloth  like  a 
baldachin  over  a  veiled  centre  figure,  each  of  whose  arms  is 
held  by  two  side  figures  (probably  a  man  and  a  woman), 
might  then  be  conjectured  to  represent  a  sort  of  symbolic 
interment  where  the  dead  is  placed  in  a  sitting  posture, 
supported  by  the  family,  instead  of  the  normal  posture, 
full  length  on  the  bier. 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  future  investigation  may  throw 
some  light  on  this  point,  and  may  also  deal  with  the  question 
whether  the  oft-recurring  motive  on  the  Roman  sarcophagi 
of  two  genii  holding  a  cloth  (parapetasma)  between  them,  as 
a  background  either  for  a  scene  or  for  the  portrait  of  the 
deceased  (fig.  44),  can  be  traced  to  Etruscan  prototypes  or 
not.  Hitherto,  we  have  probably  been  too  one-sided  in 
attributing  the  types  and  symbols  of  the  plastic  art  of  Roman 
sarcophagi  to  Greek  pictures,  and  the  investigation  of  the 
share  of  Etruria  therein  would  be  a  fine  subject  for  a  mono- 
graph. 

XVIII 

But  the  benevolent  genii  and  Lasas  are  absolutely  in  the 
minority  in  the  paintings  and  plastic  art  of  Etruria,  and 
become  rarer  as  time  goes  on.  The  mood  rises  from  sinister 
gloom  to  wild  terror.  Two  pictures  will  illustrate  this 
climax.  In  the  Tomba  del  Tifone  at  Corneto,  which  was 
discovered  in  1832  and  which  is  one  of  the  grandest  of  the 
family  vaults  of  Etruria,  there  is  preserved,  besides  the 
serpent-legged  demons  from  which  the  tomb  has  derived  its 
name,  a  large  wall-painting  representing  the  journey  of  a 


Fig.  41 

RELIEF    ON    A    TOMB    ALTAR    FROM    CHIUSI 

In  the  Barracco  Collection  in  Rome 


s6 


Fig.  43.      CINERARY    URN    FROM    CHIUSI 


TOMBADELTIFONE  57 

young  man  to  the  realm  of  the  dead  (fig.  45).  To  the  left  is 
seen  an  altar  towards  which  the  procession  of  mantle-clad 
youths  moves  ;  they  are  led  by  a  young  demon  with  snakes 
in  his  hair,  and  a  torch  and  a  snake  in  his  hands.  The 
procession  advances  to  the  sound  of  a  lituus-trumpet,  and 
the  young  men  carry  staves  and  seem  to  be  the  clients  of  the 
central  figure.  The  central  figure  is  made  conspicuous  by 
walking  without  any  attributes  in  the  centre  of  the  procession 
right  in  the  front,  but  over  his  right  shoulder  we  see  Charun's 
clawlike  hand,  and  Charun  advances  behind  him  like  a 
black  shadow,  characterized  by  pointed  asses'  ears,  snakes  in 
his  hair,  and  his  terrible  hammer.  The  high  rank  of  the 
young  man  is  made  apparent  by  the  inscription  over  his 
head  :  *  Laris  Pumpus  Arnthal  clan  cechase,'  i.  e.  Laris 
Pumpus,  son  of  Arnth,  priest  (sacerdos).  Here,  then,  we 
have  another  of  the  priestly  aristocrats  of  Etruria.  After  him 
come  two  more  companions  with  staffs,  and  a  trumpeter,^  as 
well  as  two  young  men  without  any  attributes,  and  the  scene 
is  terminated  by  some  dim  figures,  one  of  which  seems  to  be 
a  woman  with  a  snake  in  her  hair  and  another  to  be  of  negroid 
type ;  possibly  these  are  the  rulers  of  the  underworld 
according  to  a  later  local  Etruscan  conception.  One  thing, 
at  any  rate,  is  plain,  that  the  dead  youth,  in  spite  of  his 
splendid  following,  goes  to  meet  a  sorrowful  fate.  What 
can  the  sound  of  the  instruments  avail  when  Charun's  claw 
is  laid  on  his  shoulder  ! 

This  tomb  dates,  as  far  as  can  be  judged  by  the  style  of 
the  painting,  from  the  first  half  of  the  fourth  century  B.c.^ 

^  Trumpets  at  Roman  funeral  pro-  century  B.C.). 

cessions  are  known  from  reliefs  on  ^  Contemporary  and  akin  in  subject 

sarcophagi.    Rom.  Mitt,  xxxiii.  1908,  is  the  Tomba   Bruschi  at   Corneto. 

pi.  iv  (pp.   18-25),  ^^^  Cagnat  and  Monumenti,  viii,  pi.  36.    Stryk,  Kam- 

Chabot,  Manuel  d'Archdol.  Romaine,  mergrdber,  p.  lOi.     The  processions 

p.  586,  fig.  315.    Notice  in  the  second  here  have  quite   a   festive   look;    a 

relief  from  i^unitemum,  Rom.  Mitt,  woman  finds  time  to  look  at  herself  in 

1908,  pi.  iv,  at  the  bottom,  how  the  a  glass,  but  the  devils,  who  appear  in 

banquet  with  the  members  of  thefamily  the  crowds  or  lurk  in  the  corners,  show 

reclining  on  festive  couches  is  also  pre-  that  the  occasion  is  a  serious  one. 
served  in  early  Rome  (second  to  first 

2468  I 


S8  TOMBADELCARDINALE 

From  the  beginning  of  the  next  century  dates  the  Tomba  del 
Cardinale  at  Corneto,  which  was  discovered  shortly  after 
1760,^  then  forgotten  and  filled  in  again,  and  finally  reopened 
in  1786  ^  by  Cardinal  Garambi,  bishop  of  Corneto.  It  has 
suffered  much  by  exposure  to  wind  and  weather  and  to 
tourists  for  more  than  a  hundred  and  fifty  years.  It  has  a 
narrow  frieze  with  battle  scenes,  doubtless  mythological,  but 
the  interest  is  centred  in  the  long  narrow  frieze  of  pictures 
under  the  ceiling.  The  subject  of  this  is  the  march  of  the 
shades  towards  the  other  side  (fig.  46).  A  woman  is  drawn 
on  a  two-wheeled  cart  by  two  winged  demons,  one  light  and 
the  other  blue-black,  both  wearing  the  traditional  garb  of 
the  genii  of  death,  familiar  from  the  contemporary  sarcophagi 
and  cinerary  urns  :  a  shirt  with  braces,  and  high  top  boots. 
This  is  perhaps  the  young  woman  who  is  mentioned  in  the 
inscription  of  the  tomb  :  '  Ramtha,  daughter  of  Vel  and 
Vestrcni,  who  was  wife  (puia)  of  Larth  Lartha,  and  who  lived 
{valce  instead  of  svalce)  nineteen  years.'  A  young  man  follows 
in  a  long  cloak  :  he  turns  round  to  a  black,  winged  demon 
carrying  a  hammer  (fig.  47).  Beyond  the  gateway  of  the 
underworld  behind  him  a  devil  of  the  same  type  is  seated, 
and  then  comes  a  crowd  of  young  people  driven  along  by 
two  devils,  one  of  whom  threatens  them  with  his  hammer.' 
A  woman,  who  looks  back  moaning,  is  being  brutally  dragged 
along  by  two  male  demons,  and  at  the  end  of  the  procession 
two  winged  devils  are  seen  hastening  forward,  slender  of 
limb  and  agile  of  movement,  like  poisonous  insects.  In  a 
fragment  of  a  frieze,  which  is  now  badly  damaged,  the  Charun 
devil  was  once  more  seen  in  the  act  of  crushing  a  skull  with 
his  hammer.* 

This  picture  has  a  quality  which  reminds  one  of  the 

^  Caylus,    Recueil  d'antiquitds    iv.  Ducati,    Monumenti    dei    Lined   xx. 

(Paris,  1761),  112  f.  pp.   607-12.     Beazley,  Lewes  House 

^  Tiraboschi,  Storia  delta  lett.  ital..  Collection   of  Ancient   Gems,   p.    33, 

Venezia,  1795,  i.  13  fF.  footnote.  no.  36  (pi.  3). 

'  Similar   motives   on   tombstones  ^  Badly    illustrated    in    Inghirami, 

and   Etruscan  gems.      Cp.    Grenier,  Monumenti  etruschi  iv.  pi.  xxvii. 
BolognaviUanovienneetetrusque,^.^']. 


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58 


CONCEPTIONOFTHEHEREAFTER    59 

frescoes  in  the  Campo  Santo  at  Pisa,  but  which  is  much  more 
terrible  because  no  hope  of  paradise  atones  for  the  horror. 
The  reliefs  on  contemporary  cinerary  urns  tell  the  same  tale. 
To  be  sure,  the  dead  reclines  fat  and  finely  bedecked  on  the 
lid  of  these  cinerary  urns,  holding  a  drinking-bowl,  or, 
if  female,  a  fan.  This  is  only  tradition  and  has  nothing 
to  do  with  actual  feeling.  It  is  clear  enough  that  the  old 
confident  conception  of  the  hereafter  as  an  eternal  sympo- 
sium has  been  exploded.  To  this  the  reliefs  on  the  urns 
bear  witness.  These  reliefs,  if  they  do  not  directly  evade 
the  problem  by  choosing  neutral  scenes  from  Greek  mytho- 
logy, reveal  a  demoniac  possession  of  appalling  intensity. 
We  need  no  literature  in  order  to  realize  that  the  Etruscans 
under  the  pressure  of  disaster  became  another  people,  pessi- 
mistic, in  terror  of  death,  and  devoid  of  any  resiliency  which 
would  allow  them  to  indulge  in  the  pleasures  of  life.  If  this 
spiritual  incubus  descended  upon  the  masses  of  the  Roman 
people  we  can  better  understand  how  it  is  that  the  poet 
Lucretius  can  feel  enthusiasm,  and  can  arouse  it  in  others, 
when  he  preaches  the  gospel  of  godlessness  and  the  annihi- 
lation of  the  soul  in  death.^  For  of  the  Etruscan  people,  at 
any  rate,  the  words  of  Lucretius  ^  hold  good  : 

Omnia  perfunctus  vitai  praemia  marces. 

All  that  life  had  to  give,  thou  hast  enjoyed, 
And  now  thou  fadest. 

^  De  rerum  natura  iii.  912  fF.  ^  iii.  956. 


INDEX 


The  *  indicates  that  the  citation  is  in  the  notes. 


A 

Achilles,  9,  52. 
Acrobats,  28. 
Aeschylus,  19*,  54*. 
Agamemnon,  51,  52. 
Ajax,  52. 
Altars,  55. 
Amphitheatres,  25. 
Apollodorus,  36*. 
ApoIIonius  Rhodius,  27* 
Appian,  15. 
Aristophanes,  26. 
Aristotle,  15, 29*,  33, 44. 
Athenaeus,  13,  15*,  33*, 

34*.  37*- 
Attic  influence,  20,  22. 
Auguri,    Tomba    degli, 

10  f.,  41. 
Augustus,  48. 

B 

Bacchanti,   Tomba   dei, 

36. 
Ballerina,  la  bella,  3,  17. 
Ballot-balls,  32. 
Barone,  Tomba  del,  i,  2, 

20  f.,  29. 
Barracco  Collection,  55. 
Bells,  17,  37. 
Bighe,  Tomba  delle,  i, 

2,  22  fF.,  28  ff.,  46. 
Black  vessels,  23*. 
Bolsters,  30. 
Boxers,  see  Pugilists. 
Brass  circles,  8. 
British  Museum,  14,  44. 
Bruschi,  Tomba,  57*. 


Caccia,  Tomba  della,  43. 
Caere,  8,  52  f. 


Caeretan  hydriae,  10. 
Cakes,  35,  40. 
Cameron,  Mary  Lovett, 

^3- 

Campana,  Tomba,  7  f. 
Campania,  13  f.,  28,  44. 
Candelabra,  candles,  39. 
Cardinale,   Tomba   del, 

^58f-.  . 

Casuccini,   Tomba,   26, 

29*. 
Cato,  32,  35,  40,  44. 
Catullus,  48*. 
Cerecloth,  55  f. 
Chaplets,  17,  20,  37,  42. 
Chariot  race,  23. 
Charun,    7,    14,    52  ff., 

57  ff- 
Chmsi,  5,  8,  26,  29*,  38, 

44.55- 
Cicero,  II*,  26*,  27,  35, 

^48*,  54. 
Cuents,  46. 
Cloth,  55  f. 
Clusium,  see  Chiusi. 
Copenhagen,  see  Ny 

Carlsberg  Glyptotek. 
Corneto,  1-2  and  passim. 
Cortsen,   13*,    16*,   34, 

38*. 
Cosa,  8. 

Couches,  30,  41  f. 
Crete,  8,  29. 
Critias,  38. 
Cyprus,  8*,  23,  29. 
Cyrene,  9. 

D 

Dancers,  16  ff.,  19,  22, 

26,  29,  36. 
Danielsson,  10*. 


Dasti,  3*. 

Deacinare,  32. 

Demons,  49  ff.,  53  ff., 
56  ff. 

Dennis,  3,  40. 

Diodorus,  48*. 

Dionysius  of  Halicarnas- 
sus,  II*,  15,  16*,  23, 
26,  33*,  44*,  45*, 46*, 

Dispater,  13. 

Door,  painted,  11,  15. 

Dromon,  37. 


Eggs,  31,38,  42- 
Egypt,  9f.,  20,  31,  38, 

41,42. 
Equestrian  procession, 

13.  IS  f-.  23,  24. 
Eteocles  and  Polynices, 

52.. 
Etruria,  43  S.  and  passim. 
Euphronius,  24. 
Euripides,  54*. 
Euthymides,  24. 
Exercises,  preparatory, 

27  f. 


Fama,  55. 
Fescennines,  18. 
Flaminicae,  23. 
Flute-players,  15, 16,  22, 

26,  35,  40,  56. 
Footstools,  41. 
Franfois,  Tomba,  3, 

51  ff- 


Gauls,  47. 
Geryon,  50. 


62 


INDEX 


Giustiniani,    Tomba 

Francesca,  3. 
Gladiators,  13. 
Goethe,  2. 
Golden  vessels,  38. 
Golini,    Tomba,    37  ff., 

40  f.,  42,  50,  54. 
Gregoriano,   Museo,   5, 

17- 

H 

Hades,  50. 

Helbig,  5,  6. 

Hermes,  28. 

Herodotus,  52*. 

Hesychius,  16. 

Hetaerae,  32  ff. 

Hieron,  44. 

Hittites,  23. 

Horses,  16. 

Hunting    leopards,    31, 

Hypothymis,  37. 

I 

Iliad,  13,  29*. 

India,  31. 

Inscriptions,  10,  11,  15, 

21.  34.  35.  38  f-,  47  f-. 

50  f.,  57,  58. 
Ionian  style,  9,  10  f. 
Isaeus,  33. 
Iscrizioni,  Tomba  delle, 

I,  2,  14  ff.,  igff.,  41. 
Isocrates,  13*. 

J 

Jacobsen,  Carl,  5,  17. 
Juvenal,  23*,  31*. 

K 

Kestner,  i,  14,  20,  28. 
Kitchen-scenes,  40  f. 
Kneading,  40  f. 
Korte,  3,  9,  21,  53*. 
Kyme,  44  f. 


L 

Lanista,  13. 
Larth,  39,  54. 
Lasas,  54  f. 
Lassoing  of  the  horse, 

24. 
Laurels,  19  f.,  32,  56. 
Lectistemia,  34,  42. 
Lecythi,  51. 
Leonesse,  Tomba  delle, 

3.  19.31 
Leopardi,    Tomba    dei, 

30  f. 
Lesche,  53  f. 
Letto   funebre,   Tomba 

del,  41  f. 
Lituus,  54,  57. 
Livy,   8,   15*,   16*,   18, 

23*,    26*,    35*,    44*, 

46*.. 47.  53- 
Lucretius,  59. 
Ludii,  ludiones,  18. 
Lysias,  18*. 


M 

MagUano,  8. 
Martha,  Jules,  3,  23*. 
Medical  lore,  19. 
Melian  vases,  7  f. 
Mezentius,  53. 
Michelangelo,  51. 
Milani,  6,  26. 
Minium,  18. 
Morente,    Tomba    del, 

24,  40. 
Morto,  Tomba  del,  16, 

41. 
Miiller-Deecke,  23*,48*. 


N 
Naked  pages,  33. 
Nicocles,  13. 
Ny  Carlsberg  Glyptotek, 
5  and  passim. 


O 

Odrysians,  19. 
Odysseus,  51. 
Olympic  Games,  25. 
Oreo,  Tomba  dell',  36, 

49  ff. 
Orfeo     e     d'  Eurydice, 

Tomba  d',  37*. 
Orvieto,  37. 


Palaestra,  scenes  of  the* 

28  f. 
Parapetasma,  56. 
Parthenon,  25. 
Patroclus,  52. 
Pausanias,  54*. 
Persephone,  50. 
Persius,  42. 
Persona,  13*. 
Phersu,  12. 
Philochorus,  43*. 
Phoenicians,  10,  27. 
Pindar,  44. 
Plautus,  18*,  30,  32,  36, 

41*,  47,  50*. 
Plutarch,  15*,  18*,  47*, 

53*.  54*.  55- 
Polybius,  44*,  59*. 

Polygnotus,  53  f. 

Pompae,  15  f. 

Porsenna,  39,  44,  45. 

Priesthood,  35,  57. 

Prinia,  8*. 

Prisoners  of  war,  52  f. 

Propertius,  48. 

Prylis,  29. 

Pugilists,  15,  27,  28. 

Pulcella,   Tomba   della, 

3.  38,  55- 
Pulcinella,   Tomba   del, 

12  f. 
Pyrrhiche,  29. 


Querciola,  Tomba,   36, 
43- 


R 

Rasenas,  39. 

Reclining   at   table,   34, 

36, 57*- 
Riding  sideways,  27. 
Rings,  32. 

Rome,  45  f.  and  passim. 
Rumpf,  Andreas,  7  f. 
Rushforth,  39*. 
Ruva,  38*. 


Salii,  18. 
Samnites,  47. 
Sappho, 23*,  37*. 
Sarcophagi,  14,  34,  53, 

55  f-.  57*- 
Schulze,  Wilh.,  39*,  45, 

46*.  _ 

Scimmia,  Tomba  della, 

25  f-.  29>  45- 
Scudi,  Tomba  degli, 

34  ff-.  54- 
Seneca,  41*. 
Shields,  8. 
Skutsch,  16*. 
Slaves,  41. 
Soothsayers,  48. 
Sophocles,  44,  54*. 
Spectators,  24  f. 
Stackelberg,  i,  2,  14,  20, 

23,  24,  27,  28. 
Stands,  24  f. 
Strabo,  43*. 
Struppus,  23*. 


INDEX 

Stryk,  von,  3  f. 
Sunshade,  26. 
Symposia,  29  ff.,  37  if., 
42. 

T 
Tacitus,  20*. 
Tapestries,  8  f. 
Tarquinius,  45. 
Tarquitius  Priscus,  48. 
Technique,  21. 
Tertullian,  13*,  23. 
Tevarath,  11. 
Theophrastus,  19*,  34*. 
Theopompus,  34*. 
Theseus,  49  f. 
Thomsen,  Vilh.,  40*. 
Thucydides,  44*. 
Thulin,  48*. 
Thiirmer,  i,  20. 
Thymiaterion,  26,  39. 
Tifone,      Tomba      del, 

56  f. 
Timaeus,  33*. 
Tiresias,  51. 
Tomba,  see  the  different 

names. 
Tonsilia  tappetia,  30*. 
Tori,  Tomba  dei,  3,  9  f., 

20,51. 
Tor  Ionia,  51. 
Treasury   of  the   Siph- 

nians,  25. 
Triclinio,    Tomba    del, 

16  f.,  20,  27,  31. 
Tripudium,  18. 


63 

Triumphators,  18. 
Troilus,  9. 
Trumpets,  54,  57*. 
Tuchulcha,  49  f. 
Tusurthi,  34. 
Tutulus,  22  f.,  42. 
Tyrrhenians,  43. 

U 
Urns,  cinerary,  19,  30*. 
34.  53.  55.  56-  ' 


Vanth,  52,  54. 
Varro,  19,  41*,  45. 
Vases,  4,  20,  22  ff. 
Vasi :  Tomba  dei  V.  Di- 

pinti,  5,  36. 
Vecchio,  Tomba  del,  37. 
Veil,  3,  7,  35,  47. 
Virgil,  48*. 
Vitruvius,  25. 
Volnius,  45. 
Vulci,  3,  51. 

W 
Weege,  2,  4,  6,  7,  22  ff., 

27,  28,  31  f.,  34. 
Wigand,  26*. 
Women,  Etruscan,  33. 
Wrestlers,  11,  15,  28. 

X 

Xenophanes,  19. 
Xenophon,  19. 


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